A majority of Iran’s angry and disillusioned electorate are predicted to stay away from parliamentary elections on Friday, viewing the process as a masquerade of democracy intended to give legitimacy to a regime that has failed to deliver on living standards, the environment and personal freedom.
In repeated speeches, the ageing supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, has urged those planning to boycott the vote that it is their patriotic and Islamic duty to elect a new four-year term parliament – the 12th since the 1979 revolution – and an 88-seat “assembly of experts” that will choose his successor in the event of him dying during its eight-year term of office.
The elections are the first since the Woman, Life, Freedom protest movement was suppressed, leading the outgoing parliament to back laws restricting internet freedom and new fines for not wearing the hijab.
Mojgan Eftekhari, the mother of Mahsa Amini, whose death sparked the protests, published pictures of her daughter on Instagram and wrote: “If voting would change something, they would not allow you to vote.”
In a sign of the continuing crackdown, the Nobel peace prize winner and human rights activist Narges Mohammadi was not allowed to leave prison to attend her father’s funeral on Thursday. She has said the elections are stage-managed and that the true duty of Iranians is to boycott them.
The turnout in the equivalent elections four years ago was 42%, the lowest in the republic’s history, and the regime has been pulling out all the stops to improve on that figure, including by increasing the number of polling booths and candidates. Authorities said that more than 15,200 people (75%) of those who applied to run have been allowed to do so, the highest number since 1979.
In some seats, 50 candidates are competing. The majority of these candidates are apolitical, but the hope is that friends and family will vote. A pre-screening process to disqualify many of those expressing opposition or mere criticism of the regime has however been maintained.
A survey by Ispa, a semi-official polling agency, predicted a turnout of 38.5%. The former president Hassan Rouhani, himself banned from standing for the assembly of experts, has claimed a majority will not vote.
Some internal polls suggest voting in Tehran province will be as low as 22% and in Tehran city no more than 15-17%. Other leaked polls said the national turnout was heading for 18%, but that seems low given the tendency for higher turnouts in the provinces.
Slogans written in the snow on car windscreens read “No to the Mullah’s vote” while rallies at sports arenas have been notable for the rows of empty seats and absence of young Iranians. An editorial in Ham-Mihan newspaper said “unlike previous elections, who will vote is a secondary and less important issue compared to the issue of participation, especially since there is not much difference between the main candidates in terms of political orientation and understanding of issues”.
Regime leaders have by contrast predicted turnouts of 60%, a result that would be seen as an endorsement of Iranian politics. Khamenei has said high turnout would be “a manifestation of national power […] and a disappointment to the enemies who have their eyes on Iran” while the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander Maj Gen Hossein Salami declared that “every vote is like a missile that is fired into the heart of enemies”.
The Reform Front, an alliance of 16 reformist parties and organisations, has refused to advance a list of candidates in protest at the disqualifications – including the former head of the parliament’s foreign policy committee, Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, a critic of the Iranian arming of Russia in Ukraine, and a clear sign that no change in Iranian foreign policy is going to be permitted.
Mohammad-Sadegh Javadi-Hesar, a prominent reformist leader, challenged the purges. “Really, if the authoritarians believe that the reformists don’t have votes and the people avoid them, why don’t they approve them to test their political weight? Why did they disqualify the main reformist figures in the elections?” he said.
A prominent centrist, Ali Motahari, has published his own unofficial list of 30 candidates, including the former education minister and six women under the title Voice of the Nation. One of them, Afifeh Abedi, said: “The most significant conversations during this election concerned the state of the economy, the hijab, the participation of political parties, the environment, and the need for increased access to social media. Regarding the hijab dispute, Iran’s conditions have improved significantly since last year, and the gaps appear to be narrowing.”
The list hopes for two to 10 seats in Tehran, a measure of its marginalisation.
“The least we can do is not to let the situation get worse,” argued Reza Omidvar Tajrishi, a supporter.
Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi, the former communications minister, said he would be participating “if only to be a small obstacle to preventing the complete domination of those godfather elements who have emptied the elections of meaning”.
In the absence of a common enemy of reformists, fundamentalists have ended up splitting into four different lists, sometimes descending into acrimonious exchanges.
The deepest worry for the regime is that many Iranians seem to have rejected the relevance of the old divisions between reformist and fundamentalists, seeing the entire political class as complicit in high inflation, unemployment and suppression, the issues that polls show concern ordinary Iranians.
Some reformists had hoped that after conservatives took control of all the political institutions including parliament and the presidency, there would be no hiding place for them, and so reformism would recover.
The status of the parliament has been undermined by a leak of documents showing some MPs earning 15 times the salary of an engineer. There has also been criticism of the number of sons and daughters of the regime that live abroad.
To the extent to which the reformists have a distinctive political programme was outlined in Etemad newspaper: action to stem the environmental crises, an end to filtering of the internet, legal reforms to reduce the maximum period of detention to 48 hours, the prohibition of solitary confinement in prisons, diplomatic efforts to lift western economic sanctions, and more spending on health and education.
The crisis in Gaza and other issues of foreign policy – which is under the control of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the supreme leader – have not featured prominently.
