Iran Election: The Regime Cracks

Posted by Scott MacLeod Saturday, June 13, 2009 at 3:22 pm

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“I am the absolute winner of the election by a very large margin. It is our duty to defend people's votes. There is no turning back.”

Challenger Mir Hossein Moussavi spoke those words before the Iranian regime announced that he had been roundly defeated in Iran's presidential election by the controversial, hard-line incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. A statement on Moussavi's website later called on his supporters to resist “lies and dictatorship.”

Moussavi is correct in saying “there is no turning back.” Thirty years after the Islamic Revolution, the Iranian regime has cracked. The fault lines have been there for years, certainly since the stunning upset victory by reformist Mohammed Khatami in the 1997 presidential election. But the crack has never been so palpable as today. The whoosh you hear is the sound of the last remnants of revolutionary legitimacy being sucked away by a young generation that is web-connected to the outside world and doesn't buy the slogans any more.

Even some of the most astute Iran-watchers are taken aback. "I don't think anyone anticipated this level of fraudulence,” says Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “This was a selection, not an election. At least authoritarian regimes like Syria and Egypt have no democratic pretenses. In retrospect it appears this entire campaign was a show: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei wasn't ever going to let Ahmadinejad lose." Says Trita Parsi, head of the National Iranian American Council. “The disappointment and disorientation of people in Iran that I've spoken to is unmistakable.” Parsi suggested even Khamenei's role in the results is unclear. “Khamenei, most experts agree, is addicted to the perception of legitimacy for himself and the system,” he explains. “But this coup does away with any chances for such legitimacy. Indeed, it is difficult to see why he would view this situation as terribly favorable.”

The regime's security apparatus may be strong enough to withstand the outpouring of street anger we're seeing. Nonetheless, a page has turned in Iranian history. Here's why.

Mohammed Khatami won an astounding 20.7 million votes in 1997 and was re-elected easily with 21.6 million in 2001. Nobody disputed those results, or could. The wave of support for Khatami and the hunger for reform and change in Iran was unmistakable.

The 2005 election was a different story. After reformists were prevented from standing up a serious contender, the poll came down to a race between two pragmatic, middle of the road old-timers—former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and former Speaker Mehdi Karroubi. Ahmadinejad. the mayor of Tehran, a populist and an ideological hard-liner, snuck into second place in an election marked by widespread cynicism toward traditional Iranian politicians. He pulled in a mere 5.7 million votes amid accusations of ballot stuffing that prevented the better known Karroubi from capturing the No. 2 spot. Ahmadinejad then won the mandated run-off against the widely despised Rafsanjani, but with only 17.2 million votes in the two-man race.

Now, the second presidential election in a row is under a dark cloud of suspicion. Ahmadinejad had managed to boost his domestic popularity in the early days of his presidency by skillfully turning the standoff with the West over Iran's nuclear program into a nationalist cause that appealed to Iranians across the political spectrum. But his mishandling of the economy, dangerous provocations toward the West and feuds with other Iranian politicians undermined his support in public opinion. In the campaign, Moussavi, a former prime minister with solid revolutionary credentials, attracted a strong following by challenging Ahmadinejad's direction. He openly called Ahmadinejad an extremist, arguing that Iran needed to pursue a policy of détente with the West in the name of Iranian national interests. Ahmadinejad doubtless has important support across Iran, but it is certainly questionable that he had the strength to pull off a Khatami-style landslide victory.

It remains to be seen how the dispute over election fraud will be resolved. Whatever the case, Ahmadinejad may have won the election but the regime has lost much. When he voted in Tehran Friday morning, Supreme Leader Khamenei praised, as he always does on these occasions, the “people's awareness.” But as the results of the election were announced, the regime's security forces were on the streets of Tehran battling angry demonstrators, a rare scene in Iran, some of them chanting “Death to the dictator!” That's a far cry from 1979, when the streets reverberated with the slogan, “Death to America!”

--By Scott MacLeod