Election Conundrum in Iran
Iranians will go to the polls on June 18th in national and local elections
On June 18th Iranians will - or will not, for reasons that I explain here - go to the polls to elect candidates for the presidency as well as for about 1,345 city councils (and about 37,000 village councils.)
Turnout maybe lower than usual because elections in the Islamic Republic of Iran are always controversial especially for advocates of liberal democracy who claim that the elections are not really free and fair. This is because the Iranian political system takes its “Islamic” character very seriously; so much so that where Islamic values clash with republican values it is always the latter which loses out. In other words because the basic preconditions necessary for fully free and fair competitive elections - freedom for political parties, freedom of expression and assembly and so on - are missing, how to deal with highly manipulated elections is always an issue for democratic parties and individuals. In future posts I will discuss the process and the results of the local elections and what they mean for urbanism and city life. However, because the elections are tomorrow, in this post I want to share an op-ed I published yesterday on the challenges facing democratically-minded reformists in Iran focussing on the presidential ballot.
I was motivated by a friend and colleague, Alain Bertaud, who observed that the Iranian elections were not well covered in the western press. (I consider Alain to be one of the world’s most interesting urbanists; he also knows Tehran quite well - more on that in a future posts.) So in the interests of helping us get smarter about Iran I share my op-ed here. It will also serve as a good introduction and framing for future posts on local politics; have a look at some of the links. You can read my op-ed below, but I encourage you read the two related essays in the very useful special issue of Sada: Middle East Analysis (Carnegie Endowment) organized and introduced by my friend Karim Sadjadpour here.
WHY IRAN’S REFORMISTS REFUSE TO BOYCOTT ELECTIONS
Kian Tajbakhsh is a Senior Advisor to the Executive Vice President for Global Centers at Columbia University. He is an international expert in local government reform, democracy, and human rights promotion. Tajbakhsh represented the Open Society Foundations in Iran until he was arrested during in 2009 Green Movement protests.
When the Islamic Republic of Iran’s gatekeepers barred all but seven of the nearly 600 candidates who sought to run in the country’s June 18 presidential elections, Iran’s beleaguered reformist movement faced a conundrum. Should they participate in an engineered election that barred them from competing, or call for a boycott?
For many opponents of the regime, inside and outside of Iran, boycotting what they consider to be sham elections is the only logical response. Yet the consortium of reformists parties, jebhe-ye eslahat, decided not to call for a boycott. Instead, they announced that they would not endorse any candidate for the presidential ballot; some recommended that individuals refrain from voting but did not call for a formal boycott.
The most interesting of these reformist politicians is Mostafa Tajzadeh, an outspoken senior aide to former President Mohammed Khatami who was himself barred from running. [NB. I shared an Evin prison cell with Tajzadeh for over four months after the 2009 Green movement protests.] Tajzadeh declared in a tweet that the 2021 disqualifications were so blatant and egregious that the regime had passed the threshold from a hybrid theocratic/democratic regime in which elections were “engineered” to a fully despotic authoritarian regime where government officials are in effect appointed by the rulers. Elections were now “meaningless” not only because reform-minded candidates were disqualified, but because the entire process was arbitrary.
Despite this, however, four main obstacles deterred reformists from calling for an official electoral boycott. First, Tajzadeh explained that if he could be confident that 10 million people would follow a call to spoil their ballots or write in dissident politicians, then he might have supported such a protest vote. As one of Iran’s most experienced politicians, Tajzadeh’s assessment tells us a great deal about Iranian politics, specifically that the extent of support for a radical democratic transformation, while broad, may not be as universal as some claim. Indeed he repeatedly reminded supporters that there are millions of Iranians who do not support free elections or political freedom. Western pundits may idealistically hope that most Iranians support Tajzadeh’s call for free and fair elections, but he himself does not feel confident popular will exists for a protest vote--let alone a formal boycott, which he rejects as a self-defeating strategy.
The second reason was that support from other elites for a boycott was also unlikely. Gholamhossein Karbaschi, a prominent former Mayor of Tehran, founder of a popular reformist newspaper, and head of Iran’s most important technocratic party, rebuked Tajzadeh as a lone wolf who was out of touch with Iranian society and with the broad alliance of “reformist” parties. Karbaschi called Tajzadeh’s electoral platform demanding free, fair, and contested elections “unrealistic, counter-revolutionary, and anti-patriotic” and accused Tajzadeh of undermining the Islamic Republic by playing into the hands of the Western “enemy.” Even dissident journalists such as Ahmad Zeidabadi, a former political prisoner who contended there was nothing to be gained from electoral politics, have argued that democrats should focus instead on strengthening their social organizations, going so far as to claim that there is no harm in letting the military (IRGC) take over the government as they might get things done.
A third driving factor for reformist groups’ hesitancy to call for a boycott is that electoral boycotts in authoritarian settings generally do not work. With the exception of rare cases, of the 170 boycotts studied by political scientists over the last three decades, most of them failed to level the unfair electoral playing field, delegitimize the ruling regime’s fraudulent electoral practices in the eyes of the international community, or force the ruling regime to share power with democratic forces or to change. Boycotts work only if they are part of a broader political strategy targeting other sectors of the society and the economy as well as the entire spectrum of electoral contests.
In the Iranian context, an electoral boycott would mean abstaining from all municipal elections. But reformists did not want to shut themselves out of the thousands of elected local councils that still have a limited but real potential role to play in the practice of self-government. These local elections will become increasingly important in the coming years as big cities become more important in the life of the nation. Therefore, reformists announced that they would endorse a list of candidates for Tehran’s city council and they will probably do so for other large cities as well, despite the arbitrary disqualifications of local candidates.
The fourth consideration is that to be effective, a boycott must include civil disobedience (e.g. peaceful street demonstrations) that is too risky inside the Islamic Republic. Given that peaceful protests in Iran have long been repressed with live ammunition, Tajzadeh is not willing to put the lives of young supporters in danger.
Nonetheless, the clarity and concreteness of Tajzadeh’s platform as a would-be candidate in the election represent a new stage in the evolution of democratic discourse in the country. Tajzadeh’s 2021 electoral platform presented arguably the boldest and most coherent statement of liberal democratic reforms by any politician inside Iran since the revolution of 1979. The circumlocution around sensitive topics of political life that often mars the reformists’ message since they entered onto the political stage in the mid-1990s was finally absent.
The structural reforms for which Tajzadeh called would render the Islamic Republic almost unrecognizable. Tajzadeh proposed that the position of the Supreme Leader be term limited, directly elected, and ultimately merged with the presidency; the Guardian Council should be stripped of its ability to disqualify candidates to political office; all international human rights norms should be respected, including freedom of conscience, speech, assembly, and religion; mandatory hijab should be eliminated; national media, TV, and radio should be removed from under state monopoly control and censorship; the military and IRGC should be banned from direct involvement in political and economic life; and last but not least, relations with the U.S. should be normalized.
Declaring his bold demands in an open letter to the Supreme Leader, Tajzadeh called for a constituent assembly to revise the constitution. While all of this is standard fare for exiled political activists, this wish list was unprecedented coming from a longtime political insider residing in the Islamic Republic.
Whether Tajzadeh’s political program will ever translate into practical political outcomes and wider popular support for the reformists is hard to predict. Today, the nezam appears consolidated and without serious rivals. Although aspirations to democratic and concrete reform have found their clearest expression in 40 years in his program, the power of this group supporting such changes is probably at the lowest it has ever been. Tajzadeh and several others were swiftly disqualified and sidelined without causing much observable consternation in the society at large. Whether the maturing of democratic political discourse is mere whistling in the wind or can have practical impact on the direction of the country will not become clear in the short term, but more likely over a period measured not in years but decades.