It was a triumph of democracy. On July 25, in a free election, Iraq’s Kurds finally elected a real opposition party to their regional parliament. According to preliminary results, the Change Party won 25 of the 111 seats in the parliament, breaking the monopoly of the autocratic traditional parties. But it suggests that Iraq’s Kurds are going to lose again.

Lose, that is, in terms of their maximum ambitions as defined by their leaders over the past 20 years. Those ambitions included an independent Kurdish state in what is now northern Iraq, or at least a region so autonomous and self-sufficient that it was independent for all practical purposes. And for the government of that region to be self-sufficient economically, it had to control the oil-producing area around the city of Kirkuk.

Achieving those ambitions required unshakeable unity, for the Kurds are only six million of Iraq’s 30 million people, and neither the Arabs of Iraq nor their other neighbours, the Turks and the Iranians, like the idea of a Kurdish state. The outcome of this month’s election shows that that extraordinary unity among the Kurds is now fading fast.

It is fading partly because younger Kurds are fed up with the corrupt and oppressive rule of their traditional leaders, who have dominated Kurdish affairs for more than a generation. The Barzani family reigns in the west of Kurdistan (Massoud Barzani succeeded his father as the general-secretary of the Kurdish Democratic Party 30 years ago). The Talabani family rules the east (Jalal Talabani created the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan 34 years ago and has led it ever since). And both families have become very, very rich.

The families earned their roles by leading the fight for Kurdistan’s independence or autonomy over decades of struggle against Baghdad governments of every hue. The rival parties they created, the KDP and the PUK, plunged the Kurds into a nasty civil war in the mid-1990s, but since then they have cooperated in keeping the Kurdish region separate from the violence and chaos down south.

So long as independence or something very like it was the long-term goal, the traditional leaders could demand and get the obedience of most Kurds: unity came before everything else. But now that a measure of stability is returning to Arab Iraq, the prospect of independence is getting less and less likely—and there is even the dawning suspicion that the KDP/PUK alliance has left it too late to take control of Kirkuk. In that case, what’s the point of leaving them in charge of everything?

The Change Party came out of a split in the PUK, and it won almost half the votes in Jalal Talabani’s home province of Sulaymaniya. Dissatisfaction with the current system is just as great in the rest of Kurdistan, and the KDP/PUK alliance could have lost the whole election if there had been a similar revolt within the KDP.

In due course, there probably will be, because Kurdistan is going to spend the next generation as part of Iraq. That is the reality that Kurdish politics is gradually adjusting to, and one striking sign of the change is the fact that the election on July 25 was not accompanied by a referendum on a new Kurdish constitution, which declares oil-rich Kirkuk and a number of other disputed areas to be "historically" and "geographically" part of the Kurdish homeland.

Since those areas are currently under Arab rule, entrenching this claim in the Kurdish constitution was bound to heighten tensions between Kurds and Arabs, and U.S. Vice-President Joe Biden worked hard to stop it during his recent visit to Iraq. He was remarkably successful: Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki leaned on the Independent High Electoral Commission, which obediently declared that for technical reasons it could not hold the referendum in Kurdistan on the same day as the election.

Baghdad said “no” and the outgoing Kurdish parliament meekly accepted the decision, voting to postpone the referendum indefinitely. That is the new reality in Iraq.

In retrospect, it’s clear that the only time when the Kurds might have achieved their maximum ambitions was right after the U.S. invasion of 2003. To do so, however, they would have had to defy their only ally, the United States, and neither Barzani nor Talabani was willing to take the risk.

Fearing a clash with the Americans, they did not seize Kirkuk and ensure an overwhelming Kurdish majority there when they had the military power to do so. Fearing a Turkish invasion, they did not dare to declare independence. Now they can’t do either, for Iraq has a functioning army again and Kurdistan’s whole budget depends on oil revenues sent north by the government in Baghdad.

This is not necessarily a tragedy. A prosperous, democratic, secular Kurdistan, using its own language and running its own institutions, within a rather less democratic and more theocratic Arab-majority Iraq that hands over a fair share of oil revenues and leaves the Kurdish minority alone, would be an outcome beyond the wildest dreams of previous generations of Kurds.

It is still within reach, if the bitter question of Kirkuk can be finessed. And it doesn’t need the Talabanis and Barzanis at all.

Gwynne Dyer’s latest book, Climate Wars, was published recently in Canada by Random House.