Iran has exploded into mass protest and violence, in the wake of a rigged election that once again installed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. The situation on the ground is currently changing too rapidly to keep up with, but I’ve been trying to follow developments on several blogs, including Andrew Sullivan and Juan Cole.
In brief, my thoughts are as follows: I do not expect the protests to be successful. Student-based protest movements rarely succeed in achieving their political goals, especially when they’re facing a ruthless and determined regime (see Tiananmen Square, 1989). I suspect the result will therefore be the survival of the current hardline regime, but in a weakened form and with little domestic legitimacy, which paradoxically might make the regime even less likely to respond to Barack Obama’s diplomatic overtures.
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You call the elections ‘rigged’. I don’t contest that there appears to have been interference. But very few commentators I’ve been reading are willing to say that the full gap between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi could be a result of this. It is just too large.
No matter how much we hate to say it, it seems likely that a majority of Iranians did actually vote Ahmadinejad back into power.
15 June, 2009 @ 3:27 pm
Joe, I think Ahmadinejad’s huge margin of victory should probably be seen as evidence of rigging, rather than the reverse. Ahmadinejad is deeply unpopular among Iran’s metropolitan population (as evidenced by the current bout of protests) and pre-election polling, such as it was, predicted that Ahmadinejad should have won at most a plurality, and should have struggled to win a first-round victory by more than a very small margin. But suddenly, this translates into a massive 63% victory? It’s hard to explain this except by massive election rigging.
That said, it is logically possible that both statements are true: that Ahmadinejad was both the beneficiary of rigging and the genuine choice of a majority of Iranians.
15 June, 2009 @ 4:23 pm
I’m not convinced. My suspicion is that we do to Iran what we do to our own countries far too often: assume the middle class is representative of a country’s views. This allows us to inflate the support for Mousavi’s views (reformist, better on women’s rights, pro-free speech etc).
Iran is a highly literate (80%), urbanised (67%) nation, but that does not make it middle-class or Westernised. My suspicion is that we too often say “metropolitan population” when we mean middle-class population; that we conflate the views of the latter with the numbers of the former.
I hold this view partly because I am wary of dismissing support for hard-line leaders like Ahmadinejad as ‘rigging’ (as many wished to do with Mugabe a few years ago), but also partly because I think it makes sense in a country like Iran. Iran is wealthy because of oil but still relatively poor (GDP/cap comparable to Serbia and Namibia, not Kuwait or Bahrain) and conservative. Ahmadinejad wasn’t referred to as a populist in his first election for nothing, there is massive support for his approach and views.
Or at least there was. I concede that the protests and recent trends raise questions, I am merely hesitant to wish away his support. We’ll have to see what comes of Khamenei’s investigation into the allegations of electoral fraud.
15 June, 2009 @ 8:37 pm
Election? Like a thing exists in Iran. The Mullahs pick a handful of men to contest in this side-show and have the true leader picked long before a single farcical “vote” is ever cast.
See EUReferendum’s “The Loathsome Chirade”: http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/06/loathsome-charade.html
15 June, 2009 @ 9:33 pm
Joe.
they say a picture paints a thousand words.
Here are a few pictures.
http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/06/irans_disputed_election.html
16 June, 2009 @ 2:01 pm