The
New Landscape of Iranian Politics
Morad Saghafi
Morad
Saghafi is editor of Goft-o-Gu, a journal of research
and opinion published in Tehran.
|
A
group of 20 students stage a sit-in on June 22, 2003 at
Parliament in downtown Tehran. They demanded that MPs
press the judiciary to release students detained after
a week of political unrest. (Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA/Landov) |
After seven
turbulent years in which a reformist movement transformed Iran’s
political landscape as well as its international image, conservatives
recaptured two thirds of the parliament in February 2004. “Victory”
for the conservatives was achieved, in large part, by the intervention
of the unelected Guardian Council, which succeeded in rejecting
the candidacy of 2,400 reformist candidates. The “Tehran spring”—when
Iranians and international observers hoped that reformists could
bring about peaceful, democratic transformation of the Islamic
Republic—has faded.
In fact,
all indications are that Iran is joining the long list of Middle
Eastern single-party or no-party states, where populations are
not called to the ballot box except to validate the preordained
decisions of leaders who rule as if the country were their private
domain.
The unceremonious
demise of “the Iranian exception,” however, is only the beginning
of the next round in the ongoing tug of war over the shape of
Iran’s post-revolutionary polity. The experience of political
struggle accumulated by Iranian society over the past seven
years can still open horizons that were unthinkable, perhaps,
until now. One distinct possibility is the emergence of a democratic
front, composed of independent secular and religious forces,
in opposition to the monopolistic forces that desire to solve
the country’s problems through war and violence.
Sitting
In
After a
month of scrutiny, the Guardian Council—the staid clerical
body charged to ensure the constitutionality of legislation
passed by Parliament, as well as its conformity with Islamic
law—eliminated half of the 8,200 candidates for the Seventh
Majles. The rejected candidates included all sitting deputies
who belonged to the two most popular reformist parties, the
Participation Front, led by the president’s brother Mohammad
Reza Khatami, and the Organization of the Mojahedin of the Islamic
Revolution, headed by Behzad Nabavi. “Lack of respect for Islam”
was the reason most consistently cited by the Guardians for
these controversial decisions. In protest, the disqualified
deputies organized a sit-in at the Majles building. They were
joined by about 50 of their colleagues, together turning Parliament
into the headquarters of the protest movement and precipitating
a constitutional crisis without precedent in the history of
the Islamic Republic.
The elimination
of candidates, in itself, was not new. After the death of Ayatollah
Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, the Guardian Council stepped up this
practice dramatically. The wave of disqualifications reached
its height in the 1996 parliamentary elections, when 44 percent
of the candidates were barred from running.[1] Nor have the Guardians been averse to other kinds
of electoral intervention. In the previous Majles elections
in 2000, they annulled more than 700,000 ballots in Tehran alone,
nearly 20 percent of the votes cast in the capital.[2]
But there were three new aspects to the
latest round of disqualifications: the sheer number and caliber
of the disqualified candidates, the far-right composition of
the current that carried out the disqualifications, and, lastly,
the question of how the state apparatus was treated in this
process.
The mass
disqualifications were made official on January 11, 2004, and
reformist deputies announced their intention to sit in the next
day. Others preferred a more conciliatory approach. President
Mohammad Khatami and Speaker of Parliament Mehdi Karroubi rushed
to meet with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, successor to Khomeini as
Supreme Leader of the Islamic Revolution, while the National
Security Council appointed a panel consisting of the defense
minister, the intelligence minister and the head of state radio
and television, to advise on the affair’s significance for national
security.[3]
Meanwhile,
the protesting deputies did not stop at demanding that the Guardian
Council reverse its decision. They also began to use the Majles
as a pulpit to appeal to “political parties, intellectuals,
university and school educators, students and finally to all
the educated and enlightened layers of the population to recognize
the gravity of the situation and to accept the responsibility
that has fallen on their shoulders.”[4]
Following the deputies’ call, provincial governors converged
on Tehran to issue an ultimatum to the Guardian Council: if
the decision were not retracted within ten days, they would
resign en masse, effectively nixing any chance that elections
could be held.[5] By January 15, the press reported
that an honorable solution had been found at a meeting between
the members of the Guardian Council and Khamenei. According
to these reports, the ayatollah ordered that the Guardians uphold
the candidacy of the sitting deputies, except for those cases
where “convincing reasons” could be found to disqualify.[6]
However, the Guardians soon announced their own interpretation
of the Supreme Leader’s directives, saying that Khamenei had
urged them to be more vigilant than ever in safeguarding the
revolution.[7]
The striking deputies, in any case, rejected the deal proposed
by Khamenei, insisting that all disqualified candidates be treated
equally.
Lukewarm
Reaction
|
Head of the Guardian Council Ayatollah
Ahmad Jannati delivers his Friday sermon in Tehran, October
1, 2004. He told worshippers that possible UN sanctions
on Iran would make the Islamic Republic stronger than
ever. (Raheb Homavandi/Reuters/Landov) |
The deputies’
protest barely echoed outside Parliament. Worse still, initial
reactions from the student movement were lukewarm at best. The
Office for the Consolidation of Unity (Daftar-e Tahkim Vahdat),
the largest student organization and the one closest politically
to the parliamentary reformers, issued two communiqués on the
crisis before finally coming out in support of the protesting
deputies. Even the supportive communiqué pointed out that the
deputies themselves were primarily to blame for their predicament,
as they had failed the 27 million voters whohad elevated them
to power by having compromised repeatedly with the unelected
conservatives. Other student associations were more blunt. The
student association of Amir Kabir University, while praising
the resistance offered by the deputies, insisted that the real
issue at stake was whether existing laws—by implication,
the constitution of the Islamic Republic—allowed any scope
for real change.
Meanwhile,
negotiations among top officials continued. The president and
the speaker of the Majles visited the Guardian Council hoping
to find a way out of the crisis,[8] but the Guardians would not budge. On January
21, the striking deputies called on the Interior Ministry and
the president to postpone the elections. The next day, 100 deputy
ministers offered their resignations. On January 26, the cabinet
spokesman announced that the government refused to organize
an election in which there would be no competition.[9]
Over the next few days, Khatami seemed to be the only one who
still believed in the possibility of a compromise as he, along
with his minister of interior, proposed to delay the elections
in order to gain further time for negotiations. Behzad Nabavi
announced that his party would boycott the elections. Two days
later, 124 deputies collectively resigned and proclaimed their
refusal to take part in unfree elections, bringing to an end
the 26-day occupation of the Majles. Khamenei, meanwhile, publicly
rejected Khatami’s proposal to postpone the elections, unambiguously
making clear which side he was on. True to form, Khatami then
announced that he would obey the Leader’s orders and hold elections
as scheduled on February 20.
By occupying
Parliament for 22 days, and defending the rights of all citizens
to stand for office, the reformist deputies managed to regain
some of the respect they had lost over four years of parley
with conservatives. Nevertheless, the popular base of the reformist
movement largely ignored the call of the protesting deputies.
Over the preceding seven years, every time the government or
parliamentarians had issued warnings about imminent conservative
threats to the reform movement their supporters had rallied,
only to witness the struggle abandoned and a deal struck at
the top. This time they responded with a weary shrug—even
the students, who had always been at the forefront of the struggle.
Perhaps the tepid popular response to the sit-in encouraged
Khamenei and the Guardian Council to proceed with their project
of completely eliminating the reformers from the political scene.
In the end, everything worked out far better than the conservatives
had anticipated.
An Impatient
Europe
|
Iranian reformist MP Hossein Ansari-Rad
addressed protesters during their sit-in at Parliament,
February 5, 2004. The protesters called for reinstatement
of candidates barred from parliamentary elections by the
Guardian Council. (Atta Kenare/AFP) |
It was
not only the Iranian public that had grown tired of the ineffectiveness
of the reformist movement. The international community, which
had taken a keen interest in the ongoing factional struggles,
also began to show signs of impatience. Unlike the United States,
which suspended its relations with Iran after the revolution
and hostage crisis of 1979-1981, the European Union has maintained
a critical dialogue with Tehran, despite several major crises
in their rocky relationship.
Initially,
the election of Khatami in 1997 seemed to vindicate this policy.
Yet seven years later, the EU saw the reformers stuck in endless
and seemingly fruitless battles for meaningful changes in civil
liberties or the economy. The Europeans seem to have been most
frustrated by the lack of transparency as to the limits of different
political and judicial authorities, and their inability to find
a single interlocutor representing the state as a whole. This
European disillusionment might not have proven so critical if
Iran had not found itself suddenly bracketed in 2003 by two
war-torn and occupied countries, and did not consider itself,
more or less justifiably, as the next target for US foreign
intervention.
The Iraq
experience convinced the Europeans that the US could not be
allowed to set the agenda for the Middle East single-handedly.
They resolved to maintain and even expand relations with Iran,
at all costs. The Europeans were willing to close their eyes
to the anti-democratic practices of the new dominant faction,
as long as they could be the single interlocutor Europe has
been waiting for, a government capable of delivering on a grand
bargain. Perceiving a confluence of favorable international
and internal factors, the conservatives seized their chance
to deliver a fatal blow to the ailing reform movement, declining
to rescind the majority of the candidate disqualifications.
The only unknown factor was how Iranians would behave on the
day of the election.
Who
Voted?
The reformists
were convinced that their withdrawal from the elections would
lead to a dramatic fall in popular participation. However, despite
the conservative coup de force and general resentment
of the regime and politicians, the anticipated mass abstention
did not take place, according to figures published by the Ministry
of the Interior. The numbers were indeed much lower than in
previous elections; in the large cities of Tehran, Shiraz, Isfahan
and Tabriz around 32 percent of voters showed up. The shrine
city of Mashhad saw a higher turnout of 47 percent; however,
in 2000 63 percent had voted there. National figures show an
18 percent drop in voter participation compared to 2000, but
nonetheless, overall turnout was above the psychologically important
level of 50 percent. On February 20, 2004, more than 24 million
Iranians went to the polls.
Though
they are a distinct minority, the conservatives are not a negligible
force in the country. Even at the height of the reformists’
popularity, the conservatives won between 12-16 percent of the
vote. An estimated 2-3 percent cast a protest vote against the
reformists to register their disappointment. If, according to
official figures, 51 percent of the electorate voted in the
first round, and if the conservatives garnered at best 20 percent
of the vote, then who were the other 30 percent of the electorate
who voted?
The 2004
elections witnessed an exceptionally large number of first-time
voters—around 1.7 million people had reached 16, the age
of suffrage in Iran. The total number of first-time voters in
legislative elections was even more impressive, at around 7
million. These youth, aged between 16 and 20, tend to lean toward
reformists. Ordinarily, they would have been expected to abstain
from voting, but many may have chosen not to let this moment
of formal passage to adulthood pass them by. But perhaps the
key factor is the existing regional disparities, both cultural
and economic, within the country.
Confrontation
between “reformists” and “conservatives” has shaped, and limited,
the terms of debate in all six major elections held since 1997
(excluding the highly controlled elections to the constitutional
Assembly of Experts in 1998). Other political and ideological
divisions, no matter how fundamental, came to be defined in
terms of this misleading binary opposition. In reality, the
opposition of reformist and conservative has served to conceal
other cleavages. In the poorest provinces, where blood ties
tend to matter more than “modern” forms of group solidarity,[10]
the duel between reformists and conservatives had left submerged
clan conflicts, rivalries between local grandees, or tribal
and ethnic divisions. Once the divide between reformers and
conservatives disappeared, it was these local rivalries that
attracted people to the polls. Indeed, the level of participation
in less developed and fringe provinces, where the levels of
poverty are highest and literacy the lowest, were very high:
73 percent in Ilam, 62 percent in Bushehr, 75 percent in Charmahal
and Bakhtiari, 75 percent in Sistan and Baluchestan, 62 percent
in Luristan, 89 percent in Kuhkiluyeh.[11]
If the
eradication of the dichotomy between reformers and conservatives
has revived “traditional” identities in these least developed
provinces, in areas where such identity markers are weaker or
non-existent, it has generated a sense of anguish and fear.
Rumors
of Something
|
Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize recipient,
at a press conference in Paris, October 10, 2003. (Mousse/Maxppp/ReflexNews) |
In Iran,
voters are not required to cast their ballots at one preassigned
polling place. Rather, officials stamp voters’ identity cards
to prevent multiple voting and fraud. Since the beginning of
the Islamic Republic, rumors have circulated at election time
that non-voters will be subject to coercive surveillance, because
certain institutions could decide to check cards for this stamp.
Currently, there are rumors among the more affluent classes
that non-voters will be prohibited from traveling abroad. Among
the lower middle and working classes there is talk that ration
coupons—regulating the distribution of basic food items
at subsidized prices—will be denied to those who abstained
from voting. Such rumors also swirled among high school students
getting ready for the highly competitive university entrance
examinations. Each year, there are 1.7 million applicants for
150,000 admissions slots, and it was said that students who
failed to vote would see their application rejected. Students
were supposed to send in their applications two days after the
voting date. No one seemed to notice that the application form
required a photocopy of only the first page of the national
identity card, with the picture and name of the applicant, and
not the middle page, where the voting records are stamped.[12] Nonetheless, such hearsay is a sign of the Iranian public state
of mind.
Iranians
have reason to be apprehensive. On the one hand, they are witnessing
the puzzling collapse of a large reform movement in which they
had placed much hope. On the other hand, there is an ambient
sense of encirclement by a belligerent superpower which, as
recently as 2002, made many people in the Middle East dream
of rapid liberation, but whose actions in Iraq (and to a lesser
extent, in Afghanistan) have turned many dreams to nightmares.
If high hopes of improvement through the reform movement or
of “deliverance” through US intervention have been dashed, the
state of the other historical forces of
popular mobilization, namely Islam and nationalism, is not any
better.
Although
organized nationalist forces stood in opposition to the Shah,
Iranian nationalism as an ideology was compromised when the
Pahlavi dynasty (1926-1979) coopted it to legitimize absolutism.
Later, the Islamic state vilified nationalism in name, even
while appropriating nationalist themes for its own legitimizing
purposes. The Islamist campaign against Iranian nationalism
as “secular” and “Western” has subsided somewhat since the end
of the Iran-Iraq war, but the ideology is weak today. Ironically,
Islam as a traditional identity marker also finds itself in
a precarious state. The ability of Islam to mobilize, so strong
during the early years of the revolution, has been depleted
as the Islamic state has lost its mystique.
Iran is
caught between the crumbling legitimacy of formal political
authority and the decline of the ideologies that historically
have rallied opposition to authority. Coupled with anxiety over
internal repression and an external menace, the vague rumors
about a secretive center of power poised to punish anyone who
has challenged its decrees are a source of solace. It is a frightening
power, to be sure, but paradoxically, it is also a power whose
omnipresence and omnipotence are reassuring. In the last analysis,
the state is all that is left to Iranians—not just to
mitigate economic and social problems, but to protect them from
the worst. A glance at neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan, not
to speak of the Caucasian and Central Asian republics, is enough
to convince Iranians to trust in the state. Aside from the bloc
that regularly backs the conservatives, the voters in the 2004
elections showed up not to support one candidate over another,
but to choose something rather than nothing.
With
or Without the State
Capturing
the state has been the central focus of all recent parliamentary
elections and political activities. It was to keep a foothold
within the state’s lawmaking institutions that some reformist
supporters participated in the last Majles elections, raising
turnout above 50 percent. Only the state, these voters believed,
could preserve the country from the fate of Iraq and Afghanistan,
or the painful and degrading experience of post-Soviet countries.
More or less resigned to their own de facto ejection from power,
these reformers held out the hope that an end to the dualistic
power struggle in Iran would lead to a coherent state. Even
if the conservatives would be the dominant force after the elections,
at least their hegemony would allow the state to negotiate effectively
with Europe. Thus, it was either the irony of history or a miscalculation
on the part of these optimistic reformers that the conservatives
chose this moment to deliver a severe blow to the legal structures
of the state. The mass disqualifications of candidates and the
refusal to maintain even a semblance of competitive elections
made a mockery of a political process that has been the basis
of the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic.
The conservatives’
strategy and tactics were as ambitious as they were grotesque,
especially in a country where the state, directly or indirectly,
manages such a giant portion of the economy and social services.
Public health, education, cultural production, industry, commerce
and a stunning array of social subsidies are all highly dependent
on the state. Under the current circumstances, Iranian society
urgently needs an atmosphere of political liberty and a substantive
national debate, not to mention a state that enjoys great legitimacy,
to avoid either collapse or disruptive and dangerous insurrections.
At the
international level, the situation can only get worse if decisions
are taken outside formal state channels. It is true that the
absence of a unified voice representing the Iranian state has
often been a source of irritation to European diplomats of an
unaccountable few could ease the burdens of European negotiators.
But what gains Europe will reap in the short term, it risks
losing in the long run for having dealt with an illegitimate
partner.
A quarter
of a century after the establishment of the Islamic Republic,
it is hard to deny that all the Islamist currents have lost
their luster. Of more concern is the rather tragic end of a
revolution which failed to muster the capacity or the courage
to find a democratic solution to the central question of establishing
a state of law (etat de droit), or a working constitutional
order, instead of pressing on with authoritarian solutions.
Therein lies the main and probably insurmountable obstacle facing
the conservative-dominated Iranian regime: in order to plunge
the country back into unrelieved authoritarianism, the new leaders
will have to silence a society that transformed its disillusionment
with the revolution into social, cultural and political vitality.
Some argue
that authoritarianism is an easy task for the conservatives,
given that the miscues of the reform movement have so sapped
the society's vitality as to leave little but demoralized regret.
By closing down the political space through repressive controls,
the conservatives can even permit themselves the luxury of tolerating
minor liberties in the cultural sphere. After years of repression,
the society may rejoice in finding an opening in the cultural
domain. The Chinese seem to have succeeded in a similar wager—why
not the Iranians?
Such a
scenario will not transpire. The new leaders can muster the
force to subjugate the population, but subjugation will be all
they manage to accomplish. To go further, to organize the economy,
in matters such as international as well as domestic investment,
to find solutions for innumerable social problems, to negotiate
the plethora of disputes pitting the provinces against Tehran,
to appease the increasingly vocal demands of ethnic and religious
minorities,[13] to rein in the increasing range of mafias and
bandits with political connections, to call to order the “revolutionary
foundations” which have turned into a corrupt colossus[14]
and last, to negotiate international tensions, Iran needs a
legitimate state as well as a functioning legal order.
Brazen
Reaction
The current
that pushed to eliminate reformists from the political scene
consisted primarily of the most brazenly reactionary members
of the Guardian Council. This hard-line core gained the near
complete support of Khamenei following the local council elections
of 2003, when the reformists lost almost all their posts in
large cities and many local councils. The extremist conservative
current decided to finish off, once and for all, the system
that allowed the reformist movement to emerge in the first place.
To resolve the paradox of the constitutional order in Iran,
simultaneously a republic and a theocracy, the hard-liners would
purge the republican elements.
To believe
that such a coup de force can succeed, one has to ignore
that Iran has seen a quarter century of popular participation
in politics since 1979. The revolution allowed all layers of
the Iranian population, not only the urban popular classes,
but also farmers and rural peasants flocking to cities in search
of work, to play an active role.[15] By taking an autonomous role in the revolutionary process, the
popular classes managed not only to elevate their political
stature, but also to transform their culture and their political
interpretation of Islam.[16] This new popular culture was restrained, but at the same time
sharpened, by the experience of the war with Iraq, finding more
fertile ground in the course of debates surrounding the country’s
post-war reconstruction. Slow at first, and focused on social-cultural
issues, it began to take advantage of the quasi-democratic electoral
process to find a political voice and coalesce into political
currents, both conservative and reformist. By disqualifying
nearly all the reformist candidates in the 2004 elections, the
conservative current has attempted to put a final end to the
long transformation that seemed to be moving inexorably toward
a complete democratization of the Iranian political scene.[17]
Although
capturing the state has been the central focus of recent elections,
it is likely that the attempt by Tehran’s new strongmen to short-circuit
the trend toward democracy will not last very long. The conservative
coup de force in 2004 may have eliminated the symptoms
of the underlying tensions plaguing the Islamic Republic’s paradoxical
political system, but it has done so by ignoring the underlying
social processes pushing toward a restructuring of the state
itself. As a result, sooner or later, the controversy over the
configuration of the Iranian state will return to the center
of national and international attention. Because of the reformist
moment of 1997-2004, and the manner in which it ended, the debate
over the configuration of the state will not be able to avoid
the subject of democratization from now on.
Futures
and the Past
In the
wake of the conservative coup de force, three clusters
of arguments about restructuring the state can be detected.
The conservative project, by undermining the constitutional
order, and alienating the state bureaucrats, amounts to little
more than a “bandit state.” Legal and judicial order has become
even more arbitrary, and there is a sense that multiple centers
of power—from the military to organized street thugs,
conservative clerics and parliamentary deputies—are acting
ever more capriciously, to expand their own sphere of influence.
Opposition
to this premeditated project of a bandit state is gravitating
toward two competing formulations of the ideal state, one bureaucratic/authoritarian,
and the other democratic/republican. The first project would
like to rely on the state bureaucracy left over from the monarchy
to impose a developmentalist and authoritarian order. The second
would emphasize a republican order and the equal rights of citizenship,
in order to ensure that popularly elected bodies have the authority
over reconfiguring the state. Who will defend which solution,
nationally and internationally? Since consolidation of an Islamic
constitutional order—the agenda of Khatami and his reformist
coalition—has failed, the struggle is between the alternatives
vying to replace it.
The bureaucratic/authoritarian
project will be defended by forces that prefer to settle the
issue from the top down. Their hope is that such an outcome
will meet with the approval of the international community,
which clearly wants to see a stable Iranian government that
can deal directly with Europe and the US. Rising oil prices
and the impatience of American neo-conservatives to implement
their grand plans for the Middle East boost the optimism of
those who believe in this solution. Partisans of this idea are
likely to come from the Islamic nouveau riche eager to
legalize and secure their wealth through capturing state power,
many state managers, functionaries and technocrats, but also
from among the entrepreneurial Iranian diaspora, for whom the
revolution and the subsequent 25 years have been a nightmare
they would just as soon forget. In short, the idea would be
a return to the authoritarian and “modern” bureaucratic regime
that was overthrown by the Iranian revolution of 1979.
Granted,
the political network that allowed the economic rise of the
entrepreneurs in the diaspora was annihilated during the collapse
of the monarchy, and most of them had to flee the country. The
post-revolutionary Islamic political networks were built on
the ruins of the Shah’s regime when, by and large, they used
the confiscated wealth of those who had fled as the primary
source of accumulation of capital for themselves. Nevertheless,
globalization and the aggressive US project of reshaping the
Middle East have created the potential for an entente.
An alternative
cluster of arguments has been forming around a project of democratizing
the state. The failure of successive attempts to institutionalize
popular participation in the polity, from the Constitutional
Revolution of 1906-11 to the present, has become the focus of
serious self-questioning for a range of political forces. As
a result, a consensus seems to be emerging that the only viable
strategy to ensure active, serious popular and citizen participation
in reconstructing the state is a sustained struggle for its
democratization. This democratic agenda is now focused on advocating
an ever more competitive and open political field, and a struggle
for eliminating the structures within the Iranian political
system that make second-class citizens out of women, religious
minorities and secularists.
Again,
the religious-secular divisions are of secondary interest. The
defenders of the democratic project are democratic and lay activists,
but also the Islamist activists who were the cadres and rank
and file of the reform movement. The failure of the reform movement
to construct an Islamic constitutional order through winning
elections has led many of these activists to gravitate toward
calling for a strategy of secularizing the state. A large segment
of the Iranian left has also joined the call for a democratic
state, following the collapse of communism and the experience
of having lived under an ideological regime in Iran.
Nevertheless,
here also the historical past imposes separation, often severe,
among the different factions of this ensemble. We should not
forget that these three groups, which today are unified by a
common democratic project, lived through radically different
experiences during the initial years of the Iranian Revolution.
Motivated by their radical differences, these groups often fought
bloody battles for power. In these pitched battles, the Islamists
used the state apparatus to imprison and kill their rivals.
Unlike the seekers of a bureaucratic/authoritarian state, the
adherents of the democratic project can count on neither the
integration of the economy into global networks nor the good
will of the international community. They can count on no resources
but their own determination and experience, as well as the experience
of other countries that have made the transition to a democratic
polity by embracing a politics of national reconciliation and
mutual forgiveness. This will be difficult, but the institutionalization
of democracy in Iran depends on it more than ever.
—Translated from French by Kaveh Ehsani
