Maliki Won’t Seek Another Term

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki said Saturday that he would not seek re-election as leader of the Iraqi government after his current term ends in 2014. The statement came a day after Mr. Maliki, who began his second term in December, said he would cut his pay in half.

Antigovernment protests have been sweeping the Arab world, but a spokesman for the prime minister said Mr. Maliki’s decisions had nothing to do with regional developments.

Mr. Maliki is simply keeping a campaign promise to implement term limits, the spokesman said.

“Don’t take it in the frame of the recent wave with Ali Abdullah Saleh and whatever is going on,” the spokesman, Ali al-Moussawi, said in an interview, referring to the leader of Yemen who said last week that he would not run for another term. “What the prime minister has done is about the democratic process.”

Under the Iraqi Constitution, the only top leader subject to term limits is the president, who is limited to two four-year terms. Mr. Moussawi said that Mr. Maliki would seek a constitutional amendment to impose the same requirements on the prime minister.

The pay cut, Mr. Moussawi said Friday, was aimed at reducing the vast income gap between high-ranking government officials and ordinary Iraqis. Mr. Maliki is believed to earn about $350,000 a year, although the precise amount has never been made public.

But opposition leaders said they thought regional developments were at play.

Fatah al-Sheikh, a member of the Iraqiya bloc, the mostly Sunni coalition led by former Prime Minister Ayad Allawi, said that Mr. Maliki “saw what is going on the Arab streets and he knows the Iraqi street is not satisfied with what he has given them.”

He added, “A year has passed with his promises for services and security, and the situation is going to get worse.”

Iraqis have protested sporadically in the past six months over the lack of electricity and other services, and complaints that Mr. Maliki has become too powerful. However, those protests have not been as large or violent as the ones in Yemen, Tunisia and Egypt.

By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT, The New York Times. Zaid Thaker and Duraid Adnan contributed reporting.