Doug Lorimer
Candidates considered loyal to Iran's conservative clerical rulers regained control of the Majlis, the country's parliament, in an undemocratic election held on February 20. They have won at least 156 places in the 290-seat legislature, which had been controlled by liberal reformers since they won 189 seats four years ago.
The liberal reformers, who so far have won 39 seats, have sought to weaken the political hold that the conservative clerics have within Iran's semi-theocratic capitalist regime. Fifty-eight seats are to be re-contested because no candidate won more than 25% of the vote.
Speaking at a February 25 press conference in Tehran, Gholamali Hadad-Adel, head of the conservative Abadgaran (Builders of Islamic Iran) coalition, said: "We will generally focus our activities on economic reforms and at the same time respect the civil rights of the people." Abadgaran took 27 of the 30 parliamentary seats elected in the capital, Tehran, and will dominate the next legislative term along with other conservative deputies from the provinces.
The conservative victory had been widely expected, after around 2300 reformist candidates — including some 80 MPs — were barred on January 25 from running by the Council of Guardians, a 12-member panel of clerics and Muslim lawyers handpicked by the faqih, Iran's unelected "Supreme Leader". Another 1000 reformist candidates withdrew from the election in protest at the disqualifications.
Under the Islamic Republic of Iran's constitution, which was approved by referendum in December 1979, the council has the power to screen all legislation to see if it complies with Islamic teachings and the constitution, and to vet all candidates for public office.
Vetting candidates
The council claimed the disqualifications of reformist candidates were necessary because of their alleged indifference to Islam or their alleged questioning of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's authority.
The outgoing reformist-dominated parliament is supposed to sit for another three months until the inauguration of the new parliament. But around 120 of its reformist members are going ahead with the resignations they announced in protest at the disqualification of reformist candidates.
The first to resign was MP Fatemah Haqiqatjoo. "I ask the Guardians Council to inform the public via the media of the reasons why I was disqualified so that they can judge for themselves the Guardians Council's biased conduct", she said in her resignation speech on February 24. The parliament voted substantially in favour of allowing her to resign. She then thanked the chamber and left.
Amir Mohebian, an editor for the conservative Tehran daily Ressalat, told Agence France Presse that the conservatives' victory would help stimulate a drive for "economic change" that he claimed had stalled under the reformists.
"There will be no Talibanisation of the system. Rather there will be liberalisation in the economic and social realms", Mohebian told AFP on February 23.
Economic change
"Analysts point to the rise of what some consider a new breed of more open conservative, men such as Hassan Rowhani, head of the Supreme National Security Council and emerging point man on Iran's dealings with the world", AFP reported. "Much is made here of the so-called China model that would open up Iran to economic reforms without necessarily matching them with similar moves on the political front."
In the immediate aftermath of the February 1979 mass working-class insurrection which overthrew the US-backed monarchy of Mohammad Reza Palhavi, the new cleric-dominated regime of Ayallotah Rudollah Khomeini nationalised banking, large-scale industry and, on paper, foreign trade.
The law nationalising foreign trade was never implemented by Khomeini's regime — whose social base included medium-sized merchants (many of whom were engaged in foreign trade), small and medium-sized landowners and the owners of artisan workshops — and was declared contrary to Islam by the Guardians Council in 1982.
Beginning in 1990, under the conservative presidency of Hashemi Rafsanjani, the regime began to implement a policy of privatisation of nationalised enterprises and opening up of the economy to foreign investments. Last October, the French-owned Renault car company became the first foreign corporation since 1979 to be allowed to make a substantial non-oil industry related investment in Iran — to built a car plant, at a cost of US$891 million.
According to Bernard Hourcade, director of the Paris-based Monde Iranien university research group, writing in the February 2 Le Monde Diplomatique, this policy "has provided a solid economic base" for a "new elite" made up foreign-trained Iranian "executives and managers, often politically and socially conservative but modern in business practices and liberal in international affairs. They won in the 2003 local elections in the cities and are preparing for a similar victory in this month's parliamentary elections and the presidential election in May 2005."
Poor turnout
The reformist-dominated interior ministry has put the nationwide turnout in the February 20 parliamentary elections at 50.57% of Iran's 46.3 million eligible voters — the lowest turnout in a national election in the Islamic republic's 25-year existence.
In Tehran — the country's biggest city with 8 million inhabitants and a supposed reformist stronghold — only 28% of eligible voters turned out, the interior ministry claimed.
The Guardians Council, however, claims that the nationwide turnout was closer to 60% of eligible voters.
The dispute over the level of voter turnout is important because the main reformist party, the Islamic Iran Participation Front, which is led by Mohammad Reza Khatami — the younger brother of the reformist President Mohammad Khatami — called on its supporters to boycott the election.
The reformist camp has cited the low voter turnout as evidence that it enjoys the backing of a majority of eligible voters and would have defeated the conservatives if most reformist candidates had been allowed to run.
However, well before the disqualifications, many Iranians had been highly critical of the reformists' failure to deliver on their promises of greater democracy and jobs for Iran's 10 million unemployed young people.
Women
The reformists have brought some improvements in the area of civil liberties — for example, an easing of the strict dress code on women, which has allowed more women to replace their black chadors with brightly coloured coats and casually worn headscarves. Women have moved into more official positions, and more than 62% of new university entrants are women.
However, the reformists have failed to end, or even seriously challenge, the conservative clergy's power to politically impose their moral and cultural norms upon the rest of Iranian society. Nor have they managed to provide young people with jobs. For several years now, Iran's economy has only able to provide jobs for half of the 1 million annual new job seekers.
Stagnating wages and poor working conditions have resulted in large-scale labour protests in major cities, including Tehran, Isfahan, Arik, Alborz and Shiraz. In a disturbing development for the regime, worker protests are increasingly political, with the rule of the clerics being blamed for the dismal economic situation.
This disaffection with the conservative clergy appears now to have extended to their liberal-reformist rivals within the political elite.
Voter disillusionment with the reformists was clearly evident in last March's local council elections. In those elections, the candidates from the conservative Abadgaran coalition won 14 of the 15 seats on Tehran's city council. Turnout in the capital was around 10%. The Tehran result was mirrored in several other major cities.
According to Amir Taheri, writing from Paris in the February 20 Arab News, the voter turnout in this year's parliamentary election was not significantly lower than four years ago when the reformists won control of the parliament. In the 2000 parliamentary election the turnout was 67%.
"The only difference is that this time around 20% of those who went to polling stations cast blank ballots", Taheri added. "What does this mean? It means that many people went to the polls to deny the reformists the low turnout they had dreamed of. At the same time, they cast blank ballots to make it clear that they do not approve of the system.
"All in all, some 25% of the total electorate voted for the candidates. Of those, less than a quarter chose the candidates regarded as close to the 'reformists'.
"A further quarter voted for candidates who have genuine local power bases and could not be classified either as reformist or conservative. Thus the support base for the so-called conservative faction amounts to around 12-15% of the total electorate."
This estimate is consistent with the results of last March's local council elections, in which conservative candidates were swept into office on a voter turnout of between 10-15%.
On the eve of the February 20 parliamentary election, 70 reformist MPs who had been barred from running signed a letter to Ayatollah Khamenei in which they warned of a "widening gap between the regime and the people". The election result, in which the majority of voters rejected both the conservative and liberal wings of the Iranian political establishment, confirmed this assessment.
"The country faces a crisis of legitimacy", Ramin Jahanbegloo, a scholar at the Cultural Research Centre, a Tehran think-tank, told the February 25 Singapore Straits Times. "It's a crisis that's been growing since 1989, when Khomeini died. The young people, the new generation, are moving further and further away from the system."
From Green Left Weekly, March 3, 2004.
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