TEHRAN, - With the June 2013 presidential
election drawing closer, Iran's reformists are
debating what they should do in the face of the
severe restrictions to which their leaders and
political parties have been subject since the
popular protests that roiled the country after the
last election four years ago.
While some
reformists have insisted they will boycott the
election, others are arguing that it could offer a
new opportunity for political organizing
regardless of whether the Guardian Council,
the body that vets potential
candidates, will permit their well-known political
leaders to run.
Still others say much
depends on how the competition among their
conservative rivals shakes out in the coming
months. Since no conservative or hard-line
candidate has yet stepped forward to announce his
official candidacy, they argue it is too soon to
decide what position to take and that the
political environment could yet change in
unexpected ways before the election.
Presidential elections in Iran have
historically been used by reformists both to push
for a more open political environment and to
demonstrate their ability to mobilize popular
support, particularly among the urban middle
classes.
This year, however, reformists
appear more ambivalent, especially given the
continuing house arrests of their 2009
presidential candidates, Mir Hossein Mussavi and
Mehdi Karrubi, and the imprisonment of other key
reformist leaders, including former deputy
interior minister Mostafa Tajzadeh and the former
chair of the Parliament's National Security and
Foreign Relations Committee, Mohsen Mirdamadi.
Their release - as well as those of other
political prisoners - has been a top priority for
many reformists, even as a condition for their
participation in the June election.
But
some reformist leaders disagree. Former interior
minister Abdullah Nuri believes that addressing
the deteriorating economic situation and the
continuing external threat against Iran posed by
the US-led sanctions regime is more urgent than
the release of their political comrades from
detention.
In addition, Nuri worries that
the insistence on the release of political
prisoners before the reformists agree to
participate in the election will force them to
play a game under rules set by their foes. "We
should take the first step and show our opponents
that we are determined and serious," Nuri told the
monthly Aseman in October.
Former Tehran
mayor Gholamhossein Karbaschi, who supported
Karrubi in the 2009 election, has taken a similar
position.
Also writing in Aseman, he
recently asked: "Is it logical to ask our rivals
to fulfill our ultimate demands so that we can win
the competition with them? If political prisoners
were to be released [and] … economic, cultural,
and political situation and domestic and foreign
policy be improved [before the election], then why
should the reformists win power?
"These
are in effect the reformists' future programs, and
they must make an effort to fulfill them when they
reach power and not make them conditions for
participation in elections."
Such words,
along with rumors regarding the possible candidacy
of former first vice president Mohammadreza Aref
and former minister of education Mohammad Ali
Najafi, have given the impression that at least
some reformists are seriously considering
participating in the election.
Some
reformist groups have even declared that former
president Mohammad Khatami will be their candidate
despite the latter's declaration last summer that
he will not run.
Even the mention of
Khatami's name as a possible candidate, however,
has unsettled the hard-line establishment. Iranian
state television has gone so far as showing
Khatami - something it had not done for years -
and calling him a "companion of sedition".
Sedition is a term routinely used to refer to the
protests that followed the contested results of
the 2009 presidential election.
"Companions of sedition" could participate
in the election, the television program said, only
if they renounced or recanted their support of
sedition.
In December, the spokesman for
the Guardian Council, the body that determines who
is eligible to run for office, appeared to echo
that view, insisting that the disavowal of
sedition will make it more likely that candidates
will receive favorable consideration.
The
call for renunciation by institutions close to the
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, however,
was immediately rejected by key reformists. Cleric
Mussavi Khoeiniha, the publisher of the now-banned
daily Salaam, pointed out that the reformists had
made former prime minister Mussavi their candidate
in 2009.
"Now we should renounce our
support in order to participate in the election so
that they can repeat the same story? What kind of
political logic would allow us to do this?" he
asked, adding that that he is opposed to the view
that reformists should participate in the election
at any cost.
One well-known reformist who
did not want to be identified told IPS that the
supreme leader and his close advisers don't
believe the country is facing such a serious
crisis that they need reformists' participation in
the election as a means to enhance the legitimacy
of the regime and promote national unity in the
face of external pressures.
"They only
need the people we can bring to the polls and not
us. Why should we then place our votes in their
pockets?" he said.
Khatami himself has
ignored demands on him to renounce his support for
the 2009 protests and has instead, along with
former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, called
repeatedly for a free and fair election.
In doing so, he has chosen to ignore
Leader Khamenei's criticism of "those who keep
saying" that elections must be free. "In which
country elections are freer than Iran? Be careful
your words do not discourage people from
participating in elections," Khameni has warned.
Khatami reacted to the leader's criticism
by saying that a free election simply means an
election which is not engineered in advance for
the purpose of achieving specific results.
"They say we will not give permission; you
should participate in the election but only the
way we want you to," Khatami scoffed in a recent
meeting with a reformist party.
Still,
Khatami has remained vocal and has used the
pre-election political environment to repeatedly
sound the message that the reformists have not
gone away and remain an important voice for
articulating unmet needs and demands for political
and social reform in the country.
These
demands for a more open political and cultural
environment tells Abbas Abdi, a well-known
reformist journalist, that reformists should do as
they did in the 1997 presidential election when
Khatami's surprise victory shocked the
conservative establishment.
"Our
understanding should be that there is an election,
and we should participate in it. In all
likelihood, we will not receive a lot of votes but
maybe we will," Abdi stated in an interview with
the daily Etemaad.
A university professor
who asked not to be identified was even more
sanguine. "Even if there is no hope in the
benevolence of the Leader, there must be hope in
his limitations," he told IPS.
Pointing to
Khamenei's aversion to being seen as interfering
in the political process, the professor believes
that, "Between Khamenei's pretense of impartiality
and hidden interventions, a space is created for
the activities of political groups, including the
reformists."
As of now, however, it is not
clear whether the reformists believe such a space
exists and, if it does, whether they will even be
allowed to try to seize it.
This week's
arrests of more than a dozen of young journalists
who mostly work for reformist dailies and weeklies
may be an omen that the traditionally more open
pre-election environment may not be repeated this
time.
While the charges against these
journalists have not yet been announced,
indications are that their arrests are not for
their writings and relate to their alleged illegal
contacts with "anti-revolutionary"
Persian-language media outside of Iran.
The move suggests that the current
political establishment in Iran remains highly
sensitive and continues to treat reformists not as
competitors with different domestic and foreign
policy outlooks, but as a security challenge to
the survival of the Islamic regime.
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