The final results of the provincial council elections held in Iraq in late January will be announced on Thursday afternoon, Iraq's electoral commission announced on Tuesday, dpa reported.
"The results will be out at 5 pm (14:00 GMT) Thursday," Karim al-Tamimi, a spokesman for the Independent High Electoral Commission, told reporters at a Baghdad press conference on Tuesday.
Preliminary results announced earlier in February showed Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Dawlat al-Qanun (State of Law) coalition ahead in Iraq's nine southern provinces.
In Sunni provinces, the Islamic Party, a descendant of Iraq's Muslim Brotherhood, lost ground to secular Arab nationalist parties such as Salih al-Mutlaq's Iraqi National Project and the Awakening of Iraq, both of which have strong roots with Sunni tribal sheikhs.
In contested, ethnically divided provinces such as Diyala and Nineveh, Sunni parties made big gains after largely boycotting the 2005 provincial council polls.
In Diyala, site of some of the worst battles between Sunni and Shiite militias in recent years, the Sunni Islamist Tawafiq bloc, led by Vice-President Tariq al-Hashemi looked set to come out on top with a 21-per-cent showing when official results are announced.
And in Nineveh, the Sunni Arab nationalist Hadba list, founded to oust Kurdish parties from power, won 48.4 per cent of the vote, just shy of an absolute majority.
According to official figures, some 15 million Iraqis, or 51 per cent of those eligible, cast their votes for provincial councils in 14 out of 18 Iraqi provinces on January 31.
Kurdish provinces and the disputed city of Kirkuk, which some Kurds hope will one day be the capital of an independent Kurdistan, did not vote in January.