Thursday, April 25, 2024
News and Views from the Global South
POLITICS: Shock and Awe in Iran
Analysis by Farideh Farhi*
- Four days after Iran’s Jun. 12 election, the country remains in a state of shock and turmoil, attempting to come to grips with what happened.
The conviction held by a significant part of the electorate that the vote was stolen has led to protests and demonstrations in the streets, while the harsh response and clampdown by riot police and vigilante forces, particularly against university students, have created an atmosphere reminiscent of revolutionary days.
Already brewing fissures among the Iranian political elite have turned into irreconcilable differences, confronting the Islamic Republic of Iran with its most serious crisis since the early post-1979 period.
The massive demonstration – the first spontaneous and non-government-sponsored demonstration in the Islamic Republic, if the early post-revolutionary demonstrations are discounted – in support of former prime minister Mir Hossein Moussavi on Jun. 14 has assured the continuation of a fluid, improvised, and unpredictable historical moment.
It was an unambiguous show of force intended to counter the sizeable and yet smaller demonstration held in support of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s declared victory the day before.
It did not have to turn out this way. On the morning of Election Day, everything seemed calm and on the cusp of a historic poll that would have reportedly produced an unprecedented 80 to 85 percent turnout.
Voting began on the heels of almost 20 days of a carnival-like atmosphere in medium and large cities all over Iran, made possible by the mobilisation of the supporters of the two reformist candidates, Moussavi and former Parliamentary speaker Mehdi Karrubi.
Heated competition between the two reformist candidates and growing outrage over President Ahmadinejad’s misrepresentations in television debates about the state of the Iranian economy, as well as his record and previous controversial remarks, had energised the electorate in the last couple of weeks of the campaign in ways not foreseen by either the candidates or pundits.
The animus against Ahmadinejad and savvy campaigns run by the two candidates achieved the unthinkable and, if the total number of votes announced by the Interior Ministry is accepted, brought into the electoral process at least an additional 11 million voters out of the announced total eligible electorate of 46.2 million.
In retrospect, however, it was precisely this extensive mobilisation that must have frightened the hard-line sectors of the Iranian elite in general and the office of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in particular – enough to elicit their nod for what is now widely seen as the most blatant election fraud in the Islamic Republic’s history, leading to the hasty announcement of Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory by an unbelievable 62.6 percent of the vote in comparison to Moussavi’s 33.75 percent.
Electoral manipulation – or ‘engineering’, as it is sometimes called – is not uncommon in Iran. It is part and parcel of the political process and has become increasingly sophisticated in recent years to prevent repeats of the 1997 election when reformist Mohammad Khatami unexpectedly won in a landslide. At that time, the unprecedented number of people participating in the election (79 percent) effectively prevented large-scale fiddling with the ballots.
On the eve of that election, the two most prominent political figures in Iran – then-president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei – having been informed of the political sentiments in the country by the security and intelligence apparatus, came out and publicly assured voters that their preference would be respected. Their shared concern about possible violence almost certainly brought the two leaders together.
Since then, stricter vetting by the Guardian Council – intended to demoralise voters about their available choices – has been utilised to keep turnout in both parliamentary and presidential elections to somewhere between 50 and 60 percent, a level that assured conservatives, given their own popular base and control over key institutions, they would prevail in future votes with only marginal manipulation.
This election proved different and hence uncontrollable. The decision to manipulate election results in a brazen fashion seems to have been taken in advance, as evidenced in the ransacking of the offices of reformist candidates even before the polls were closed and what now appears to be have been a concerted effort to interfere with the country’s communications system, in which text messaging and mobile phones play a major role.
The wholesale arrest of reformist leaders and the immediate presence of security forces and vigilantes in the streets all suggest premeditation.
They also suggest another major difference between 1997 and today: a clear split between the two major icons of the post-Khomeini Islamic Republic.
Rafsanjani, who supported Moussavi, publicly warned against the possibility of fraud and questioned Ahmadinejad’s allegations of corruption against him in an unprecedented public letter to Khamenei before the election. Still, the Supreme Leader chose to endorse the results, calling it in a written statement a “divine miracle” within 24 hours of the closing of the polls and even before the Guardian Council had the chance to certify the results.
Khamenei’s decision to ignore Rafsanjani’s warning about the possibility of events getting out of control will in coming days be assessed as a marker for his ability to use “correct political and social perspicacity, prudence, courage, management of sufficient power” to lead the country; – characteristics specified as qualifications for the Leadership by Section 3 of Article 109 of the Iran’s Constitution.
It will probably be a while before we know whose idea it was to manipulate the election results in such a brazen way.
Those who planned and implemented it probably thought the large turnout made it impossible for subtle manipulation of results and decided to go for broke. The brazenness was in all likelihood also deemed necessary as a show of force to make sure that the chunk of the electorate that is usually silent in Iran but was mobilised by this election returns to its apathy and cynicism.
Judging from the size of the demonstrations of the past two days, however, that tactic has not yet worked, presumably because of the extent of mobilisation during the election campaign, the shock many felt when the results were announced so hastily, and because significant players in Iranian politics such as Rafsanjani – who has been conspicuously absent from public view in the past few days – have effectively been forced to fight for their political lives behind the scenes by drawing from the considerable fortunes and networks of influence they built up during their years in politics.
As the head of the Assembly of Experts, Rafsanjani retains the power to call into question the supreme leader’s management of the crisis. As a leading cleric he also has close ties to Iran’s major sources of religious legitimacy – none of which have so far congratulated Ahmadinejad for his reelection.
The decision by all three of Ahmadinejad’s foes to lodge formal complaints against the results and, most importantly, Moussavi’s decision not to back down and to continue to call for people’s peaceful presence in the streets have also raised the stakes for everyone involved.
Elections have been at the core of the Islamic Republic’s claim to legitimacy as a political system, and there is no doubt that some individuals will have to pay for this systemic inability to manage a critical election.
The issue at hand is who. The answer lies in the outcome of the power conflict that is not only being played out on the streets of Tehran and several other large cities, but also at the highest levels of Iran’s political structure.
*Farideh Farhi is an Independent Scholar and Affiliate of the Graduate Faculty of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa.
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