Iran returns to the polls on March 1st. As every four years, the authorities are organizing new parliamentary elections in the face of growing apathy among citizens. Few believe in elections that offer no real alternative. Not even the coincidence of the renewal of the Assembly of Experts, a conclave that will likely have to elect a new supreme leader during its eight-year term (the current one, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is 84), provides an incentive to reverse the abstention , which triggered the suppression of the reform movement from 2009 onwards.
This date marked a before and after in the Islamic Republic. Many Iranians viewed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election against a candidate, Hossein Mousavi, who is far more popular among young people as fraudulent. But the brake on the reform efforts of the generations that did not experience the 1979 revolution began several years earlier. It was during the government of Mohamed Khatami whose timid opening gestures neutralized Iran's real power: the alliance between the supreme leader and the Revolutionary Guard military.
During the nearly three decades that I have covered Iran's various elections (presidential, parliamentary, and local), I have witnessed citizens' gradual disillusionment with a process that not only ignores their desires for change, but does not even offer them any more offers options. The system is responsible for restricting any possibility that does not fit the parameters of power through a series of parallel institutions such as the Guardian Council, which has the right to veto the candidates and also the laws passed by Parliament finally passed (Majles). So their “Islamic democracy” remains a mere shell without content.
The requirements required of candidates for the office of the House of Representatives include not only being a devout Muslim (with the exception of the five seats reserved for religious minorities) or supporting the Islamic Republic. The court consists of the 12 jurists of the Guardian Council (half of whom are religious and are appointed by the Supreme Leader) and decides at its own discretion on their ideological and moral suitability.
Let's take Tehran as an example. The province where the Iranian capital is located, a metropolitan area of 15 million people, elects 30 representatives. Official speakers are loudly announcing that almost 3,900 candidates are applying, three times more than in 2020. But this overabundance of names does not offer any real alternatives. Most reformist and moderate candidates were vetoed. In fact, former President Hasan Rouhani, who is hardly suspected of being anti-system despite being less dogmatic than the current rulers, has failed to compile a complete list of approved members of his political group (there are no real parties in Iran). Meanwhile, the Reform Front, which brings together around twenty reformist organizations, will not even take part and has denounced that the call is “neither competitive, nor free, nor fair.”
The ultras, who have controlled parliament for two decades and hold 232 seats (out of 290 total) in the outgoing chamber, do not want to risk losing even an ounce of power. However, the protests of recent years have highlighted the dissatisfaction of a significant part of the population, be it women, young people, precarious workers or the unemployed. Everything is not even together in the Assembly of Experts, which is by nature a more conservative fiefdom due to its religious nature. The Guardian Council vetoed Rouhani, who sought re-election. And Iran's current president, the ultra-conservative Ebrahim Raisí, has avoided running for Tehran, opting for a small rural district where he remains the only candidate after the withdrawal of a possible rival and the disqualification of the rest.
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Then why are they calling elections? Why maintain the fiction? The rulers of the Islamic Republic continue to seek legitimacy in the vote due to the dual nature of their regime, namely republican and theocratic. But the political project, which was a novel proposal against the Shah's tyranny in 1979, has become another form of despotism 45 years later. That's how the Iranians understand it. According to the Interior Ministry, only 30% of potential voters intend to vote. If confirmed, it would be the worst result in its history.
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