Gwynne Dyer, Contributor
IT DOESN'T make sense. In the previous two presidential elections, in 1997 and 2001, Iranians voted more than two-to-one for the reformist candidate, Mohammed Khatami. It did them little good, of course, because the Islamist clerics who have veto power over the elected parts of the Iranian government blocked his attempts to liberalise the system. But it seemed clear that younger Iranians in particular were fed up with clerical domination of politics and the corruption, incompetence and oppression it fostered.
Since the 2001 election, unemployment has got worse (officially 16 per cent, but really about 30 per cent) and the poor have got poorer. So why have Iranian voters now elected the hardest of hard-liners, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to the presidency with a two-thirds majority?
Ahmadinejad is a staunch supporter of the Islamic state, an instructor in the Basij, the voluntary youth militia that monitors people's dress and behaviour, and a close associate of the Supreme Ruler, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He is definitely not a 'reformer,' though he does promise to attack corruption. Why did he win?
PARTIAL DEMOCRACY
Iran's partial democracy first came under serious attack in last year's parliamentary election, when the ruling clerical elite concluded that the reformers were growing too popular. The Guardian Council disqualified 3,000 parliamentary candidates from running on the grounds that they were not Islamic enough, including 80 sitting members of parliament (out of 290). President Khatami's feeble protests were ignored, parliament fell under Islamist control, and Iranians who oppose the regime began to lose faith in electoral politics.
The Guardian Council tried to pull the same trick with this year's presidential election, disqualifying all the reformist candidates, but the opposition responded by threatening to boycott the election, which would have reduced it to a farce. Ayatollah Khamenei intervened, and two reformist candidates were allowed to run together with one "moderate" (Rafsanjani, formerly president in 1989-97 and a cleric himself) and four hard-liners.
It was actually a very small landslide. Back when Iranians believed that electing a reformist president could bring change, voter turnout was huge, but it has been plummeting as they lost hope: from 83 per cent in 1997 to 67 per cent in 2001, 62 per cent in the first round of voting this month - and only 47 per cent in the second round. Ahmadinejad's 'landslide' was less than 30 per cent of qualified voters.
The hard-line Islamists now control every branch of Iran's government, appointed or elected, and for a while they will have their way.
But what really happened last week was that a majority of Iranians abandoned the electoral path to reform as hopeless. At some point in the future, therefore, they may try the path of non-violent revolution that has succeeded in so many other places recently - and they might win.
The Islamist regime knows this. It also knows that the only thing that could now restore its credibility is an American attack. It may be tempted to provoke Washington in the hope of getting some American bombs dropped on Iran.
Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.
