Yesterday, most Iranians didn’t even bother to vote in the country’s sham elections. Only about a quarter showed up at the polls. There was no point in voting, because only the most hardline candidates were allowed to run. Even hardline Islamic clerics were barred from running after being deemed too moderate and insufficiently hardline by Iranian authorities.
The election was the first since a women-led uprising against religious rule filled streets and led to the arrests and threatened execution of thousands of people (at least 800 of whom were actually executed in 2023):
Authorities reported a record-low turnout of 27 percent, even after they extended voting for an additional two hours, amidst widespread disillusionment and calls for an election boycott.
The country had suffered months of unrest following the death of Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for not complying with the country’s mandatory hijab rule in September 2022. Although the streets have calmed down, it was the most significant challenge to the Islamic Republic yet.
The Iranian government was clearly hoping that the parliamentary elections would be an opportunity to show that Iranians had renewed their trust in the system. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei recently argued that voting was an act of resistance against the Islamic Republic’s enemies. Banners in public places stated that “strong turnout = strong Iran.”
Instead, the election became an opportunity for Iranians to show that they were still fed up with the system. Jailed women’s rights activist Narges Mohammadi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize last year, called on Iranians to avoid the “sham elections” in order to show the “illegitimacy of the Islamic Republic.”
Even many figures from within the Iranian system declared their intent to boycott. A group of 300 political figures, including former members of parliament, signed a petition stating that they would not participate in an “engineered” vote….
Since the 1979 revolution, Iran has been dominated by Shiite Muslim clergy and military figures who make all important decisions and allow the public to choose only between relatively similar candidates. In the past, they allowed the public to choose between the most hardline candidates and less hardline candidates for parliament and the presidency, although all candidates had to be basically supportive of the regime.
So the public was at least allowed to pick the lesser of two evils. As a result, election turnout was typically at least 50 percent and sometimes as high as 70 percent
But in the last few years, even that limited choice has evaporated. In reaction to protests in 2019, Iran’s regime launched a crackdown that killed hundreds of people. It then banned thousands of candidates from the February 2020 parliamentary election, even though those candidates supported most of the regime’s policies. The only candidates allowed to compete were virtual political clones of each other. As a result, a record low 42 percent of voters turned out that year.
Even past hardline leaders responsible to killing many dissidents are now barred from running for being too moderate. Hassan Rouhani, who was Iran’s President during the brutal 2019 crackdown, was recently banned from running for office. He joins a long list of Iranian hardline leaders who later are deemed too moderate to continue participating in politics, including former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was in office during a bloody 2009 crackdown on protesters that killed at least 500 people.
