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And in Iran, the winner is ...
Rafsanjani
By Safa Haeri
PARIS - As expected, given their pre-poll
maneuvers to tilt the playing field their way,
conservatives dominated the seventh legislative
elections in Iran, putting an end to four years of
endless, futile disputes more on semantics than the real
problems at the heart of the majority of Iran's 70
million people, like jobs and security, that the victors
now promise to address promptly.
According
to the latest figures released by the Interior Ministry,
a little over half of the country's 46 million eligible
voters went to the polls on Friday, the lowest level in
all elections held in the past 25 years, and candidates
considered loyal to the Islamic rulers took at least 149
places in the 290-seat majlis,
or
parliament, which had been controlled by pro-reform
lawmakers since their landslide win four years ago.
In that four years, reformist
parliamentary bills were consistently blocked by the Guardians
Council (GC), the conservative 12-man watchdog that supervises
both legislation and elections. In the run-up to the
election, the GC disqualified some 2,500 candidates,
mostly reformists, including all the top vote-winners
from the 2000 election.
A key result in the polling gives
the Coalition of Builders of Islamic Iran, a new
grouping comprising lesser-known politicians, scholars,
civil servants and Revolutionary Guard officers close to
former president Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani
all the 30 seats of the majlis allocated to the
capital Tehran, the reformists' traditional bastion.
Current majlis
Speaker Mehdi
Karroubi, a reformer closely aligned with President
Mohammad Khatami, trailed in 31st place. The Speaker had
broken ranks with other reformists by taking part in the
ballots. Top of the 30 is Haddad Adel, a scholar and
husband of the daughter of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei.
Rafsanjani, who as the chairman of the
powerful Assembly for Discerning the Interests of the
State (ADIS, or the Expediency Council) sits between a
Supreme Leader who has been harmed by the election
wrangling and a president who has lost virtually all his
popularity and charisma, is considered the real winner
of the electoral crisis.
According to most Iranian political
analysts, the next majlis
will be controlled by "moderate,
non-political" candidates "united" under the umbrella of the
pragmatic Rafsanjani, who before the elections had predicted that
the new parliament would be "more docile and
balanced" than the outgoing one that was controlled overwhelmingly
by the noisy but ultimately impotent reformists.
In sharp contrast to both Khamenei and Khatami,
former president Rafsanjani (1989-97) has expressed
regret that the "tragic events before the elections" had
created a "sour atmosphere" in bringing the people to
"turn their backs" (to the elections), blaming
indirectly the GC for the situation. The new parliament
is now likely to be a struggle between the more
pragmatic conservatives and the more hardline ones, with
Rafsanjani playing the role of chief mediator.
Offering an olive branch to the
badly lamed president Khatami, Adel, who is head of the
minority in the outgoing majlis - and who if
confirmed as Tehran's No 1 candidate might
become the majlis' first-ever non-turbaned
Speaker - said that if Khatami came "back into line" and
worked for the betterment of needy people, he would
certainly be helped by the next parliament. This should
appease those who predict a "difficult" period for
Khatami in his relations with a majlis
controlled by conservatives in the last months of
his presidency. This position is up for re-election in
the middle of next year.
Khatami, though, has sided with the
Supreme Leader every time the regime has been challenged
by people in the streets, as in the student
uprisings of July 1999 and 2003. He also had a good
working relationship with a legislative controlled by
hardliners in the period between his first election to
the presidency in 1997 until the parliamentary elections
of 2000, when the reformists swept the majority of the
majlis'
290 seats
"The best
message the voters sent was that there will no longer be
a majority or a minority [in the next parliament], but
representatives at the service of the people, dedicated
to solving their problems," said Ahmad Tavakkoli, a
conservative candidate who secured second place in
Tehran.
Commented
Mohammad Mohsen Sazegara, a former "Islamist
revolutionary" now struggling for a "radical change" of
the theocracy into a secular democracy based on the
power of parliament: "The conservatives blamed their
reformist rivals for the situation [political unrest],
but in fact the population had made up its mind much
before, realizing that under the present political
system, there is no way to bring any major or real
reform. When Khatami was elected to the presidency
thanks to a massive vote from the younger generation,
Iranians were happy with the limited reforms he
promised. But the system is such that neither he, nor
the majlis
he controlled, were able to advance one
single item of their reforms. As a result, what people
are asking now is no more reforms in the constitution,
like limiting the powers of the Guardians Council or
giving the president some of his constitutional
responsibilities, but fundamental structural changes,"
Sazegara said.
Meanwhile, the conservatives will
have to deliver where the reformists failed, especially
in the economic arena. Their pre-election slogans all
stressed the need to put factional struggles aside to
get the nation back to work, especially the thousands of
young people pouring onto the job market. This will
entail large investment, especially form abroad. For
this reason if no other, Iran and its politics cannot
remain isolated from the outside world.
Shaky
international support
"It's plain for everybody
to see that these were from the start flawed elections
in which in at least half the constituencies, reformist
candidates were not on offer to the electorate," said
British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, a close contact
between Iran and the United States, as he arrived for a
meeting of European Union foreign ministers in Brussels
earlier in the week.
A draft statement by the
ministers called the election a "setback for democracy"
in the Islamic republic and in Washington, the State
Department's senior spokesman, Richard Boucher, said:
"It was not an electoral process that met international
standards and I think you've seen other members of the
international community say that."
"The death of
illusions in Iran also means the death of the European
policy of 'constructive dialogue' first proposed by the
Germans in the 1980s and now most actively pursued by
the British. That policy was based on the assumption
that the regime can reform itself, peacefully and
speedily. It is now clear that it cannot," wrote veteran
Iranian journalist Amir Taheri in the Saudi Arabian
English-language newspaper Arab News. "They [EU] can
decide to, holding their noses, continue dealing with
the Iranian regime because they need its cooperation on
a number of issues, notably nuclear non-proliferation,
Iraq and Afghanistan. Or they can orchestrate a set of
new diplomatic, economic and even military pressures on
the regime as a means of encouraging the emergence of a
genuinely democratic internal opposition."
The administration of US
President George W Bush, for its part, needs to
develop a coherent analysis of the Iranian situation.
It must decide whether or not Iran is, in the words of
the State Department's No 2 Richard Armitage, a "sort of
democracy" or a "despotic regime", Taheri added.
Therein lies the dilemma for the West. Although
the EU is likely to continue its so-called "critical
dialogue" that was coined by Germany, Iran's main trade
partner and political supporter, analysts warn that in
the event that the "monopolists" really try to set the
clocks back, especially on the social scene, the EU will
move closer to the United States in taking a tougher
attitude toward Tehran, mostly on the sensitive and
controversial issue of Iran's nuclear programs. The
conservatives struck a deal with Britain, France and
Germany last November to open Iran's nuclear facilities
to inspection, much to the concern of the US, which
wanted tough sanctions on the suspected rogue nuclear
nation.
(Copyright 2004 Asia Times Online Ltd.
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