{news} MERIP: Iran's Presidential Runoff: The Long View

[Justine McCabe]

Iran's Presidential Runoff: The Long View
 
Kaveh Ehsani
 
June 24, 2005
 
(Kaveh Ehsani is a research scholar at the University of Illinois-Chicago
 and an editor of Middle East Report.)
 
Many observers were caught off guard when the first round of Iran's
 presidential election on June 17, 2005 catapulted the arch-conservative
 mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, into a runoff against former president
 Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani. Ahmadinejad's unpredicted strong showing
 raises the prospect that he could win in the second round on June 24,
 thereby consolidating even further the control of radical conservatives over
 the Islamic Republic. Some commentators have warned that such a development
 presages "Talibanism" in Iran; others see an Ahmadinejad victory as
 tantamount to a military takeover of Iranian politics.
 
These concerns are not mere hyperbole. Mehdi Karrubi, a former speaker of
 Iran's parliament and one of two first-round candidates hailing from the
 reformist current that dominated the legislature from 1997-2004, continues
 to question the validity of the first-round results, accusing the
 authorities and conservative-run campaigns of fraud and voter intimidation.
 Ahmadinejad beat out Karrubi by some 600,000 votes, out of more than 29
 million total ballots cast, to stand in the runoff. Even Rafsanjani briefly
 threatened to pull out of the runoff in response to what he called illicit
 influencing of voters and "character assassination," following the
 announcement by the Interior Ministry of the discovery of "millions" of
 flyers and DVDs attacking him personally. Such negative campaigning is
 prohibited by law in Iran.
 
In this climate, many concerned intellectuals, artists, academics,
 businessmen and activists have thrown their support behind Rafsanjani, who
 is not a democrat by any definition of the word, to forestall what they view
 as the threat of "fascism." Even Rafsanjani's erstwhile political rivals
 from the Participation Front Party and the Mojahedin-e Enqelab Organization,
 both constituent parties of the reformist front that was largely locked out
 of the 2004 legislative elections, have backed the wily, unprincipled
 ex-president. Meanwhile, a vocal rejectionist camp, both inside and outside
 the country, is calling for a boycott of the second round on the grounds
 that elections in the Islamic Republic are nothing but a means of deluding
 the populace into believing that they have a real say in the orientation of
 a regime that is otherwise completely delegitimized.
 
Without a doubt, an Ahmadinejad victory could be a major setback for Iran's
 tortuous process of democratization. The conservative forces that he
 represents have been consistently exclusionary and intolerant in both
 rhetoric and practice. They have regularly resorted to the use of violence,
 up to and including committing murder, to deal with their critics. Nor can a
 Rafsanjani victory be seen as a positive step forward, given the human
 rights record of the Iranian regime from 1989-1997, when he was president.
 
These two gloomy scenarios are precisely why it is important to take the
 time to analyze the results of the first round calmly, as well as lay out
 the various political positions that have been taken regarding participation
 in the second round, in order to evaluate the long-term prospects of
 democratic development in Iran.
 
IN SEARCH OF THE BIG LOSERS
 
Those hoping to revive the political fortunes of the defeated reformist
 front suffered a shock when their expectation that a large voter turnout
 would benefit their favorite son proved incorrect. The last polls before the
 June 17 round showed the most reformist-identified candidate, Mostafa Moin,
 running neck and neck with Mohammad Baqir Qalibaf for second place to
 Rafsanjani. Qalibaf, a police general, presented himself as a "soft
 conservative" who would maintain law and order and battle corruption.
 Qalibaf's support in the polls stood at 15 percent and Moin's at 14 percent,
 compared to 26 percent support for Rafsanjani. The other candidates trailed
 well behind. Around half the electorate -- a low number by Iranian
 standards -- were expected to vote.
 
On June 17, fully 61 percent of the electorate showed up at the polls. The
 higher turnout did not benefit the Moin campaign, but instead added to the
 totals of Karrubi and Ahmadinejad, the two candidates who ran on platforms
 of social and economic populism. Rafsanjani received 6.2 million votes (21
 percent); Ahmadinejad came in second with 5.7 million (19 percent); Karrubi
 garnered 5 million votes (17 percent); and Qalibaf and Moin both won around
 4.1 million (14 percent and 13 percent, respectively), with the two other
 candidates bringing up the rear. The outcry about irregularities from the
 Karrubi camp is credible, given the known preference of the military
 establishment for Ahmadinejad and given the narrow difference between their
 vote totals. Nevertheless, it is clear that the more significant portion of
 Ahmadinejad's tally was either siphoned from other conservative candidates,
 like Qalibaf and former state television chief Ali Larijani, or came from
 formerly undecided voters who had gravitated toward the Tehran mayor as he
 railed against corruption and ostentation.
 
Why did Moin not perform according to expectations? His campaign, responding
 to popular discontent with the reformists' unfulfilled promise, sought to
 convince the voters that reformists were now pursuing a more careful
 strategy to secure the institutionalization of democracy in Iran. The
 parliamentary reformists, along with their ally President Mohammad Khatami,
 had been thwarted multiple times by the encroachments of the Guardian
 Council, an unelected clerical body charged with judging the compatibility
 of acts of Parliament with the tenets of the Islamic Revolution. Moin said
 he would find ways to ward off these interventions and those of Ayatollah
 Ali Khamenei, successor to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the revolution's
 Supreme Leader. In comparison to Khatami, Moin lacks charisma. Instead of
 flashing personal star power, he promised to adhere to party discipline in
 formulating and implementing policy. Moin's candidacy marked the first time
 that the lay reformers who compose his party had put forward a non-cleric as
 their candidate. They did so in explicit competition with their reformist
 allies, the Assembly of Combatant Clerics, whose candidate, Karrubi, is a
 cleric.
 
In the penultimate stages of the campaign, as Moin's popularity failed to
 increase, his backers broke a political taboo and extended their hand to
 Iranian opposition forces that have stayed inside the country, but have
 always stayed outside the regime. In addition, Moin announced that his
 administration would contain minority Sunni Muslims as well as non-regime
 opposition figures. Moin's campaign pledged to continue political
 liberalization and economic reforms, to struggle to free political prisoners
 and protect the press and civil society groups, and to defuse tensions with
 the United States over Iran's nuclear program. If Moin rose in the polls
 during the last weeks of the campaign, it was because of these overtures to
 those politically marginalized by the system.
 
However, in the end, and possible vote rigging notwithstanding, this
 strategy proved unsuccessful. The majority of the population was not swayed
 by a platform geared to the urban, educated middle classes and short on
 actual evidence that Moin could deal with the crippling political deadlock,
 not to mention the pressing problems of unemployment and increasing poverty
 plaguing the working classes.
 
But perhaps an even bigger disappointment was reserved for those who called
 for a boycott of the first round as a way to rob the regime of the
 legitimizing effect of a high turnout. If one compares the 61 percent
 first-round turnout to the nearly 70 percent turnout in the 2001 contest
 that reelected Khatami, it appears that only an additional 10 percent of the
 electorate turned their backs on the election in the end. It is by no means
 clear how many of these were convinced to do so by the boycotters' call.
 
The boycott camp maintains that elections in the Islamic Republic serve only
 to prolong the life of a system that is fundamentally irredeemable. Instead,
 some in this heterogeneous camp demand a referendum, held under
 international auspices, to change the constitution of the Islamic Republic.
 Others call for waves of civil disobedience. Whatever the merits of these
 positions in principle, the only visible practical strategy of this camp
 seems to be refusal to participate in the political system. The paradox of
 this strategy is that effective organizing to challenge the system can
 scarcely occur without the modicum of political and civil liberty that
 presently exists. This liberty, in turn, is a byproduct of electoral
 politics and the erstwhile ascendancy of reformers therein. Outside the
 country, the political programs of Iranian exiles are varied, but there are
 indications that some exile groups hope to replicate in Iran the kind of
 peaceful regime change that occurred in Serbia, Ukraine and Georgia. In
 Washington, according to the June 16 Financial Times, the International
 Center on Non-Violent Conflict has quietly played an influential role in
 shaping the discourse on this topic among exile activists, including the son
 of the former Shah, as well as State Department officials. However, as the
 first round showed once again, absent the hard work of building grassroots
 social and political organizations on the ground, which could then present a
 convincing picture of a political transition without chaos and major
 hardship, the Iranian public is unlikely to follow such leads.
 
READING THE VOTE
 
A major lacuna in the strategic thinking of both the reformist and the
 rejectionist camps has been their neglect of the "political sociology" of
 contemporary Iran. Numerous studies, as well as patterns of voter behavior
 over the past eight years, have shown that the Iranian public is, by and
 large, cautious and pragmatic, rather than ideological. Outside major
 cities, elections are always hotly contested affairs. People in rural areas
 and provincial towns continue to participate in electoral politics in fairly
 large numbers simply because they realize that elected officials, whether
 presidents or parliamentarians, are the only channel they have (or will
 have) to central power. The inhabitants of this large "periphery" -- who
 make up the majority of the population -- know that the meager resources
 distributed to them are negotiated through such elected officials and might
 not arrive at all without their aid. Such realism among the population
 living outside major cities prevents them from risking the loss of the only
 "voice" they have in the power structure.
 
The fact that Karrubi and Ahmadinejad did so unexpectedly well in many
 smaller towns and provinces, as well as among urban dwellers of modest
 means, stems from their humble personas as well as the similarities in their
 messages. Both came across as unassuming men of provincial origin, who
 refused to call for cuts in the enormous state subsidies to industries and
 agriculture or to countenance further privatization of state assets.
 Instead, both men promised further downward redistributions of wealth.
 Ahmadinejad, in particular, sounded a note of egalitarianism, promising a
 return to the austere self-denial and revolutionary purism of the 1980s.
 
By contrast, the reformists surrounding Moin continued to direct their
 appeals to the middle classes, and openly spoke of themselves as a party of
 "the elite" (nokhbegan, a term which, unfortunately, does not have the
 negative connotations it carries in English). Rafsanjani's support came
 primarily from the same strata, and especially from entrepreneurs,
 technocrats, state managers and liberal economists, who appreciate his
 long-established commitment to neo-liberal economic policies. Both the Moin
 and Rafsanjani camps assumed the provincial populations would follow the
 lead of the urban middle classes. Ironically, however, the only mass
 abstention from the election in the first round seems to have come from
 precisely these urban middle classes. At the same time, there are worrisome
 indications of a rise of class hostility in the rural and provincial vote,
 which may indeed gather behind the obscurantist candidacy of Ahmadinejad in
 the second round.
 
UNAPPETIZING CHOICE
 
It is ironic indeed that Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, the most reviled man
 in Iranian politics, the very personification of corruption in the eyes of
 Iranians, has emerged as the great hope for safeguarding the democratic
 progress achieved in Iran in recent years. Without much convincing evidence,
 but always with firm conviction, the Iranian public, as well as outsiders
 like the editors of Forbes magazine, maintain that Rafsanjani and his
 relatives have exploited their political power to accumulate fabulous wealth
 and establish a grip over major sectors of the Iranian economy. Ahmadinejad,
 in his latest salvo, claimed that the ex-president's family controls Iranian
 oil revenues, citing the fact that one of his sons is a high official in the
 Oil Ministry.
 
Rafsanjani is a consummate politician and dealmaker, a master tactician with
 neither scruples nor a strategy aside from playing both ends against the
 other, preferably with a light touch. It will be no surprise, if he wins, to
 see his presidential rivals accommodated as members of his cabinet: Qalibaf
 as interior minister, Larijani as higher education minister and Moin as
 minister of culture. Nevertheless, as a hard-core realist, Rafsanjani will
 ensure the continuation of the relative glasnost that is the basis of Iran's
 long and difficult march to democracy. The greatest threats to the
 institutionalization of homegrown democratic forces in Iran are internal
 chaos and violent civil conflict, the demagogic reemergence of radical
 populist Islamism represented by Ahmadinejad, and, ever present in the
 background, the specter of military confrontation with the Bush
 administration. The least that can be said for Rafsanjani is that, as a
 politician, he may be capable of staving off these threats.
 
The conservatives, at least for now, have refrained from using violent
 force, and have shown that, some cheating aside, they can put together a
 formidable political machine to mobilize voter support in election after
 election. But to date, this conservative establishment has not once managed
 to muster more than 12 million votes, or 24 percent of the electorate. While
 the conservative support has a ceiling, the nebulous reformist -- or, more
 appropriately, anti-conservative -- forces are far more numerous, but also
 heterogeneous and volatile. Whether these voters will enter the booths en
 masse to ensure that a dangerously demagogic current does not gain all
 levers of political power in Iran is an open question. What is certain is
 that an outright conservative victory will severely curtail the limited
 freedoms of the press, civic organization and grassroots mobilization that
 have so drastically transformed the Iranian polity and society over the past
 eight years.
 
The June 24 runoff may well be a very close affair. The provincial bloc that
voted for Karrubi may be attracted to Ahmadinejad's radical egalitarian
 message, thereby augmenting the assuredly unified conservative vote. If the
 middle classes stay away, this will be an especially close election. In that
 case, dirty tricks and the kind of fraud displayed by the hardline
 paramilitary organizations and the Guardian Council could tip the scales in
 favor of Ahmadinejad.
 
WHITHER IRANIAN DEMOCRACY?
 
In the long run, the anti-conservative and democratic forces in Iran --
 whether secular or religious -- need to match and then outmatch their
 opponents in creating the institutionalized political networks (such as
 functioning political parties, trade unions and formal civic associations)
 that can link them to those segments of the population who have felt
 unrepresented by the reformist movement. In addition, these forces need to
 act on their apparent realization that only an inclusive democratic front
 that unites these rival groups against their authoritarian and Islamist
 opponents will have a chance to succeed. However, and ironically, the
 short-term survival of the democratic movement in Iran will depend on the
 victory of Rafsanjani.
 
That said, the presidential election in Iran has also demonstrated that no
 single political trend enjoys hegemony -- not conservative Islamists, not
 post-Islamist reformers, not secular democrats and not rejectionist
 advocates of regime change. None of these forces can hope to solve the
 daunting problems facing the country alone, either by using violence or by
 relying on external aid. Barring a disastrous foreign military intervention,
 the path of democracy in Iran will continue to be tortuous, but real.
 Would-be democrats will need to take into account the heterogeneity of the
 society, and the existence of an array of political forces that can barely
 stand each other but will need to come to a modus vivendi if they wish to
 live to fight another day.
 
Despite the unappetizing choice between Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani, all is
 not gloom and doom. The campaign allowed for many important lessons to be
 learned the hard way, and these can become the new basis for a broader-based
 democratic front. The voting to date has made clear that the expectations of
 Iran's majority of provincial, rural and urban poor people for improved
 economic conditions, and a greater voice in the power structure, cannot be
 ignored any longer. None of the extant political forces can take popular
 support for granted. The emergence of a broad-based coalition politics for
 democratic change can become the most valuable outcome of the 2005 election,
 no matter which candidate comes out the victor.
 
-----
 
For background on the first round, see Arang Keshavarzian and Mohammad
 Maljoo, "Paradox and Possibility in Iran's Presidential Election," Middle
 East Report Online, June 17, 2005.
 http://www.merip.org/mer/mero061705.html
 
The winter 2004 issue of Middle East Report, "Iran's Clouded Horizons,"
 offers in-depth coverage of the reasons for the passing of Iran's "reformist
 moment." Order the issue, or subscribe to Middle East Report, via a secure
 server at MERIP's home page:
 http://www.merip.org
 
 
 
.
 Middle East Report Online is a free service of the Middle East Research
 and Information Project (MERIP).
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