HIS hopes of being elected may or may not come true on Sunday, but life has already improved remarkably for Hakim al-Zamili.

Two years ago, he was on trial in a Baghdad court, charged with using his post as Iraq’s deputy health minister as cover for running Shia death squads. He was accused of financing killing sprees against Sunnis, and even using ambulances as hearses to ferry murder victims to secret graves.

Now, after a trial that collapsed amid widespread claims of witness intimidation, Mr Zamili is busy presenting himself not as a warlord, but a democrat. Sitting under a portrait of Moqtada al-Sadr, the Iran-backed Shia cleric whose militia waged war against both British and US troops and fellow Iraqis, he talks earnestly of the need for “technocratic government” and the fight against corruption.

“I want to serve my people,” said Mr Zamili, who claims the charges against him were the result of a smear campaign. “I want to remove the obstacles from their path.”

Like Mr Zamili himself, there is much else about Sunday’s polls that begs the benefit of the doubt. On the surface, a vibrant campaign has been fought, defeating the best efforts of al Qaeda suicide bombers to derail it, and engaging both Sunnis and Shia Muslims with equal vigour. It is likely that Nuri al-Maliki, the uncharismatic but astute prime minister, will be returned to office – the first time in Iraq’s history that its people will have stuck with a leader voluntarily. But as the country’s 19 million war-weary voters visit the ballot boxes today, they will do so under the shadow of Iran, their powerful neighbour to the east.

Nowhere are those shadows more strongly felt than in Sadr City, the vast, two million-strong Shia slum to the east of Baghdad that is Mr Zamili’s power base.