Iran: Continuity We Can Believe In
Although there is no smoking gun at this stage, several indications have led many Iranians to suspect that last Friday’s presidential election was rigged. While I expect the post-election unrest to die down over the coming days and weeks, public perceptions of electoral fraud could undermine the regime’s legitimacy over the longer term.
Indeed, the margin of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s victory – 63% – surprises me. True, Business Monitor International (BMI)’s core scenario over recent months had been a victory for the conservative incumbent, but I began to waver from this view in the wake of what appeared to be a late surge in popularity for his key reformist rival, former prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and on the eve of the election Business Monitor Online suggested that the result was too close to call. Were we fooled by abundant positive media coverage of Mousavi (who polled 34%) over the past few weeks, or was this election stolen?
Weak Showing Of Opposition Figures On Their Own Turf
There are a number of reasons to suspect the latter. For one thing, official results have Ahmadinejad winning 57% of the votes in Tabriz, the capital of East Azerbaijan province, which is where Mousavi, an ethnic Azeri, hails from. Traditionally, Iranian voters have favoured candidates from their home provinces so this outcome is somewhat surprising. Indeed, the fact that Ahmadinejad’s share of the vote was fairly consistent across all of Iran’s provinces is surprising, for in previous elections there have been considerable ethnic and regional disparities.
As another example, Mehdi Karroubi, the other reformist and an ethnic Lor, failed to take his home province of Lorestan and only won 0.9% of the national vote. While I never counted Karroubi as a realistic challenger, I did not expect such a low number for him, especially as he took 17.2% of the vote in the first round of 2005’s presidential elections. In addition, the fourth candidate, former Revolutionary Guards commander Mohsen Rezaee, was always going to struggle to attract much support, but his polling was also disastrous, attracting 1.7% of the national tally and failing to attract much support even in his home province of Khuzestan.
So What If It Was Rigged?
I was always sceptical that a Mousavi presidency would have led to a US-Iran rapprochement, and Tehran would certainly not have halted or abandoned its nuclear programme. Mousavi is a regime insider: he was the prime minister of the country in the 1980s, and in any case, presidential candidates are thoroughly vetted before being allowed to stand. As the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei sets Iran’s foreign policy, for all Mousavi’s pre-election talk of improving the country’s international relations, he would have been severely constrained. Indeed, Khamenei shows no sign of softening his anti-Western stance.
In short, Mousavi was not intending to bring the regime down from within. However, Khamenei could well have feared that Mousavi would turn into some sort of Gorbachev-type figure, unwittingly bringing down the system by ushering in greater freedoms that would eventually snowball into greater and greater demands for change.
Ahmadinejad meanwhile does have a large support base of lower class and poorer Iranians, the sort of people whom Western reporters did not spend much time interviewing in the run-up to the polls. At the moment, allegations of cheating are impossible to substantiate and, in my view, matter less than the perceptions that the election was fraudulent, and the implications of resulting public sentiment.
The weekend rioting in Tehran (and elsewhere) by Mousavi supporters appears to have ceased, and Mousavi – who certainly believes that he was robbed of the presidency – called off a large protest rally he was planning to hold on June 15 amid threats that militias policing the event would be equipped with live ammunition. Any residual unrest will likely die down over the coming days and weeks as the government clamps down on dissent.
Long-Term Consequences Could Be Significant
Over the longer term, the consequences could be more harmful for the regime, which derives a degree of legitimacy in the eyes of the public from having popular elections (even though these are in truth neither free nor fair by international standards), in marked contrast to many states across the Middle East. If the population at large were to suspect that the election was rigged in favour of Ahmadinejad, this could greatly increase general disillusionment with the government. Many of the people who voted for Mousavi did so not because they thought he was going to bring in significant change, but rather in protest against the regime and against Ahmadinejad. If these voters were to reason that the government will not even pretend to listen to them and is prepared to commit wide-scale election fraud in order to suppress their voices, then this threatens to undermine the regime’s legitimacy. The consequences of this beyond the near term could be significant.