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THE
ROVING EYE
Iran's election
hangover
By Pepe Escobar
Iranian
theocracy-meets-democracy - for all its
imperfections - swung into action on Friday as
46.7 million eligible voters were asked to choose
a new president from seven candidates. All
indications are that only three will be left
standing at the end of the day: the wily mullah -
Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani; the populist cop -
Mohammed Baqir Qalibaf; and the reformist -
Mostafa Moin. The latest indications are that
Rafsanjani will garner about 40%-plus of the vote,
with the other two trailing. In 
which case,
Rafsanjani will square off against the nearest
challenger on July 1 as a candidate needs 50%
support to win outright.
Half of Iran's 67
million people are less than 25 years old, and
two-thirds of the electorate are under 30 - 15
year olds are allowed to vote. Thus they have no
memory of the Islamic Revolution of 1979. For the
candidates (average age 62), the Holy Grail was
how to capture not only the massive youth vote but
also the female vote (52.1% of the population; no
female candidates allowed).
After the
reformists were dealt a huge setback in early 2004
when the Guardians Council disqualified almost all
of their candidates for being "un-Islamic",
Iranians became experts in deploying boycott as an
electoral weapon. Nevertheless, voter turnout this
time is expected to be higher than 50%. The regime
for its part deployed a huge propaganda campaign -
on the media and the mosques - urging people to
vote.
The next Iranian president will face
myriad internal problems - basically jobs, jobs,
jobs (one out of three Iranians is unemployed) and
the end of corruption - as well as tremendous
political turbulence along Iran's borders both in
the Middle East and Central Asia, not to mention
Washington hawks' "axis of evil" obsession with
regime change.
The revolution won't be
televised
It's easy to point out what
won't change. Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei will
remain the Supreme Leader, the definitive
"defender of the revolution" (and
commander-in-chief of the Iranian armed forces),
with the system of velayat-e-faqih assuring
the preeminence of religious jurisprudence over
politics.
No wonder people like Abdullah
Momeni, a spokesman of the largest Iranian
reformist student organization, called for a
boycott. After outgoing president Mohammad
Khatami's failures to push through promised
reforms, nobody realistically believes any
reformist president can face the Guardians
Council. Many students in Tehran in fact are
basically saying "no matter who wins, we will all
lose".
Some powerful political players may
not lose at all. A geopolitical axiom in the "axis
of evil" era is that the hardest core of the
mullahcracy in Tehran as well as the most
imperialistic neo-conservative armchair warriors
in Washington feed on each other. Neither side
wants a detente.
No one knows whether this
Iranian presidential election will represent a
revolutionary turning point or just a hollow
reality show. It is certainly much more
representative than what passes for political life
in US-supported Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan,
Pakistan or Uzbekistan.
The George W Bush
administration has dismissed the elections as
"rigged". President Bush said that "Iran is ruled
by men who suppress liberty at home and spread
terror across the world". All this is inevitable
when neo-conservatives still dream of blowing up
the Iranian regime.
Iran has all the
potential to be the new China. Tehran's gross
domestic product is larger than Shanghai and
Beijing put together. The new generation of
Iranians instinctively knows it - and they want to
start building this new China, right here, right
now.
Iranian students don't forget that
Rafsanjani, under his two previous presidential
mandates, sent thousands of intellectuals to jail
and ordered libraries to be burned. Perhaps the
most revolutionary perspective at the moment is
being exposed by people such as prominent activist
Ebrahim Yazdi: "Not voting would play into the
hands of totalitarian forces. It is after the
election that the reform movement will begin."
Rafsanjani's show?
Rafsanjani,
a faithful disciple of Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini, the father of the revolution, is the
ultimate Persian Machiavelli. A wily pragmatist
and former two-term president, he now cloaks
himself as self-appointed savior of the Iranian
nation. Hard to swallow for many - as he's widely
considered to be the wealthiest man in the
country. Extremely well connected, Rafsanjani's
reach threatens even the Supreme Leader. They've
been rivals since Khomeini was in power.
As much as he describes himself as "a
pillar of the revolution", Rafsanjani has also
stressed that "young people should not be
prevented from expressing their views and
opinions". His recipe to re-start the economy is
more privatization, thus more jobs. On foreign
policy, the key issue in Rafsanjani's platform is
that he's against the development of an Iranian
nuclear bomb, as he's "going for a policy of
relaxation of tension and detente, and this is a
policy I will apply to the United States".
Qalibaf, 43, Iran's former top cop and
presidential adviser, also describes himself as a
pragmatist. He says he's neither a conservative
nor a right-winger - though he's definitely close
to Khamenei. Oozing charm, he's aiming for mission
impossible - trying to bridge the gap between the
mullahs and the nation's youth. He's got the
religiously correct credentials (his wife is not
allowed to shake hands with an unknown man, for
instance) as well as authority (a veteran of the
Iranian security forces). On the other hand, his
campaign slogan could have been fashioned by
Madison Avenue: "Iranians have a right to a good
life." Some European diplomats comment he could
even prevail over Rafsanjani. Crucially, the
Rafsanjani camp in Tehran sees Qalibaf as a Trojan
Horse - introduced by Khamenei to undermine or
even bury his old rival.
Moin, 50,
educator, medical doctor, reformer and former
minister of university education and technology,
will try to follow in the footsteps of Khatami. In
his rallies, according to the Tehran Times, he
called for the "upcoming establishment of a
Democracy and Human Rights Front in Iran to defend
the rights of all Iran's religious and ethnic
groups, the youth, academicians, women, and
political opposition groups whose rights are often
neglected."
His target was 16 million
high-school students, 7 million academics, more
than 2 million college students, at least 1
million teachers and 50,000 professors who badly
want an educated man as main interlocutor - not a
millionaire mullah or a cop. But vast swathes of
the intelligentsia - as well as the media industry
- may vote for him just out of despair. The Moin
camp hopes that if he reaches the second round,
the silent, fed-up majority will decide to support
him en masse. It's an ambitious strategy. The Moin
camp says they are laying the groundwork for a
mass movement; this election is just the
beginning.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us
for information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
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