A plague on both houses
Though Iranian reformists were soundly defeated in last week's parliamentary elections, the result was not a ringing endorsement of a conservative agenda, Rasha Saad reports
The sweeping victory of conservatives in last week's Iranian parliamentary elections came as little surprise. This result had been anticipated since in January the conservative Guardian Council barred more than 2,000 reformists, including 80 sitting MPs, from running for office.
Dubbed by conservatives as "completely free and fair", by reformers as a "silent coup d'état", and a "serious blow" to reform by CIA Director George Tenet, the elections clearly mark a new phase in the struggle for democracy.
Pro-reform candidates only won 40 seats in the 290-seat assembly, compared to 154 for conservatives, according to Interior Ministry official results released on Thursday. There are currently around 190 reformists in parliament. Independents won 30 seats, five seats are reserved for religious minorities and 60 seats are to be re-contested as running candidates did not get the minimum 25 per cent of votes needed to claim them. The number of women in the parliament will also drop from 13 to around eight, with just one of them having run on a pro-reform platform.
The outgoing reformist-dominated parliament is supposed to stay in office for another three months until the inauguration of the new parliament. However, around 120 of its reformist members, including sitting Parliament Speaker Mehdi Karoubi, a close ally of President Mohamed Khatami, who failed to win in the first round, intend to resign in protest of the Guardian Council's action.
Reformers are not taking their defeat lightly. Dozens of angry Iranian reformist parliamentarians have demanded that President Khatami appear before them to explain why he let last week's elections go through despite the mass disqualifications. Meanwhile, reformists are slowly regrouping, and considering tactics such as civil disobedience or passive resistance. Others are seeking to build up their parties and to develop non-governmental organisations and other tools of civil society.
"Going outside the parliament and even outside the government is an opportunity for us to reorganise our party," said Mohamed Reza Khatami, the president's brother and head of the largest reform party, the Islamic Iran Participation Front, which chose to boycott the elections.
As a result of the Iranian elections and the victory of the conservatives over the reformists, many people expect reforms in Iran to be paralysed by the setback. However, other observers, while registering their criticism to the parliamentary elections process, believe that the results of the elections were not as disastrous as has been portrayed. They argue that while reformers have been defeated, their beliefs and reform agenda have survived.
"Victory is when your opponent is forced to adopt your slogans in order to win," said Iranian analyst Mohamed Sadeq Al-Husseini.
Vice President Mohamed Abtahi also pointed to the reform movement's achievement of a moral victory because conservative candidates were now adopting their slogans and programmes.
Before the elections, Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, head of the conservative Abadgaran, or Builders of Islamic Iran coalition, pledged his party would not reverse the reforms implemented by the previous parliament, although it would seek some changes. "We don't want to turn the clock back on reforms, we just want to adjust the clock," he said. "We have certain complaints over things that have been done in the name of reforms and we will try to correct them." Abadgaran took 27 of the 30 parliamentary seats elected in the capital, Tehran, and is set to dominate the next legislative term. Haddad-Adel himself is a possible contestant for the post of parliament speaker.
Abadgaran has lobbied for an agenda based on economic reforms and respect of civil rights. Haddad-Adel and his party are representative of what has been seen as the emergence of the "new conservatives movement" whose supporters refer to themselves as "real reformists at heart". The movement is believed to be a new breed of more open, pragmatic conservatives with a conciliatory approach. The group excluded hard-liners from their ranks in hopes of giving the conservatives a new face.
Fahmy Howeidy, an Egyptian expert on Iran, explained that with the changes which the reformists succeeded in imposing during the last six years in Iran, the conservatives realised they need a makeover in their tone and policy positions.
"The conservatives are aware that things have changed in Iran and that the country they have left [since reformers came to power in 1997] is not the same as today," Howeidy said. Accordingly, now that reformers have pushed the ceiling of dialogue, there is a wider margin of freedom and bolder criticism of the regime than ever before. Howeidy also mentioned the possibility that the more than two million students across Iran could launch massive demonstrations if confronted with political and social repression, as happened in 1999. "Conservatives just cannot afford to go backwards," he added.
Conservatives are also trying to polish their image as they ready for next year's presidential elections. Hassan Rowhani, the conservative head of the Supreme National Security Council who is responsible for Iran's nuclear affairs, is currently the leading candidate.
The victory of conservatives in Iran could also eliminate the deleterious effect of a government divided between two bitterly opposed camps. Without the context of internal power struggles affecting the coherency of diplomatic initiatives, Iranian foreign relations should improve. Efforts to resume ties with countries such as the United States and Egypt are expected to gain a boost. "My forecast is that the strategy of detente in foreign relations should be continued, maybe faster than before because the system has more trust in the new people in parliament," said influential conservative commentator Amir Mohebian.
Amidst this struggle between reformists and conservatives, many Iranians have become politically indifferent. The reformist-dominated Interior Ministry has put the nationwide turnout in the 20 February parliamentary elections at 50.57 per cent of Iran's 46.3 million eligible voters -- the lowest turnout in a national election in the Islamic republic's 25-year history. In Tehran -- the country's biggest city with eight million inhabitants and a supposed reformist stronghold -- only 28 per cent of eligible voters participated.
While some eligible voters did apparently heed a call by two reformist parties for boycotting the elections, the low turnout may have also reflected the "gap" between the people and their government. "If the new groups that come to power seek to ignore the wishes of the people then the gap will widen," commented Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian human rights activist and winner of the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize.
While reformists attribute their loss to the Guardian Council's plot to guarantee an easy win to the conservatives, analysts believe that well before the disqualifications, many Iranians had been sceptical of the reformists' ability to ever deliver on their promises of greater democracy and jobs for Iran's 10 million unemployed young people. Voter disillusionment with the reformists was clearly evident in last March's local council elections as conservatives gained control through low reformist voter turnout. Meanwhile, some sitting conservative MPs were reported to be frustrated at the Guardian Council's actions, because they thought they could have won in a fair rather than controversial election as they did in the local ones.
This year, however, some Iranian voters even had a bolder message to say to their regime. According to Iranian observer Amir Taheri, this time around 20 per cent of those who went to polling stations cast blank ballots. "Many people went to the polls to deny the reformists the low turnout they had dreamed of. At the same time, they cast blank ballots to make it clear that they do not approve of the system," reasoned Taheri.
