Mick Hartley

Parliamentary elections this Friday in Iran, and it’s a battle between conservatives and….different conservatives:

Iran’s hard-liners head into Friday’s parliamentary elections burdened by the unpopularity of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad because of an ailing economy. But they have a safety net: Rival reformists are crippled after the clerical leadership threw out their best candidates.

All sides agree that conservatives should retain their dominance of parliament. But the election may give hints of the depth of Ahmadinejad’s support among conservatives, some of whom have become disillusioned with the fiery leader. […]

The Guardian Council, a body of hard-line clerics and jurists who check candidates for their loyalty to the revolution, barred more than 1,700 candidates from running, most of them reformers, including their best-known leaders. […]

Because of the disqualifications, reformers are not competing in races for about 200 of parliament’s 290 seats, said prominent reformist Mohammad Reza Khatami, brother of former President Mohammad Khatami.

Reformers had hoped to stage a comeback after their dominance of parliament was broken in 2004. In that election, many of its lawmakers also were barred from running by the Guardian Council, allowing hard-liners to take over.

Unsurprisingly, there’s a certain amount of disillusion among voters:

Young Iranians are not going to vote. An increasing number of them say that they are disillusioned, betrayed by a system interested in perpetuating itself at all costs.

Besides, the various committees charged with selecting candidates for the elections on March 14 have blocked the reformists in every way possible, and no great transformation of the political landscape seems likely. The opposition can’t get a foothold, and it won’t get one in parliament.

“What election?” one young student answers sarcastically, adding: “All the good candidates have been rejected. It won’t change anything”. One of his peers echoes these sentiments, saying: “We will go to vote only if the religious authorities force us”…

Gholam Abbas Tavassoli, a professor of sociology at the University of Tehran and a member of the Iran Freedom Movement, in an exclusive interview published by the online news agency Rooz, says that in Iran the elections are becoming “a ceremonial event” that has little to do with genuine voting. “Uniformity in the parliament will mean that there will be no opposition voices, so corruption in the government will not be checked. The basis of democracy is the presence of opposition groups, and those who have views that are different from those in power. If things continue as they have been, then in the future elections will merely be a ceremonial event, rather than real elections. In other words, elections will become merely a ceremonial event that people go to once every few years to vote, without really impacting the relationships of power”.