Iran: successful mass boycott of elections to 7th Majles
What next?
It would appear that the results of the overwhelming boycott of elections to the 7th Majles (parliament) marks the end of an era. The preceding era which began with another election marked by the crushing victory of Seyyed Mohammad Khatami over his rival to the presidency in May 1997. The new era is pregnant with momentous developments in the structure of power, its policies as well as the popular anti-government movement below. What defined the preceding period was an unofficial alliance between a large section of the population, who had had enough of the despotic theocracy, and a section of the ruling elite who had raised the flag of political reforms strictly within the governing order.
The preceding period was triggered by a series of popular revolts in six major cities and a wave of unrest and strikes. In an effort to stem the tide of popular discontent and revolt, there was renewed efforts to draw the people into various channels of official “participation”. The real power holders, the ultra-conservatives led by the supreme leader Khamene’i, agreed to inject some life into elections by allowing some of the governing elite to compete under reformist slogans, and to have some limited role in running of affairs. This policy shift encouraged a large majority of the population to participate in elections and through their support for the reformists express their hatred of the real rulers of the Islamic Republic. In the period of May 1997 to March 2000, in three elections, the people conquered for the reformists the presidency, and a won a majority in the Majles and nationwide in the municipal councils.
What this experience, however, unequivocally showed was that the structure of power in this system is blocked from within. It is unreformable. It became clear to most that the theocracy in Iran is impervious to the popular vote. It needs the vote of the people, but not for decision making, or even as an exercise in consultation, but as a declaration of obedience and submission [1]. People understood that they need to go beyond this structure if they want to have any say in running their destiny and in their work or neighbourhood.
It also became crystal clear that the reformists cannot fill the void between the people and government. The limited retreat by the ultra-conservatives only emboldened those down below. Increasingly the people are setting their sight on fundamental changes and structural political transformations. The reformist tendencies within the system have lost their ability to create enduring obstacles to stem these advances. The negative election experience made it clear to many that the way they can intervene in politics is in the streets and through direct political action. Those holding the real reigns of power also understood that the reformists can no longer be relies upon to act as a reliable buffer for the regime. The system can no longer be saved through political tinkering. The only sure way to save the theocracy appears to be to categorically deny the people their vote. This is precisely what happened in this election.
No more pretending
The election to the seventh Majles in February this year illustrated these two choices. A majority boycotted the election, indeed turned this boycott into an active campaign against the government. Those at the top also abandoned indecision, fastened their gun belts and stacked the Majles with their chosen pieces. Interestingly the people had already abandoned the electoral route last year by almost totally boycotting the elections to the municipal councils. Participation in that election was the lowest recorded in the life of the Islamic regime. Moreover since July 1999 they had increasingly returned to direct action in the form of waves of strikes, street protests and growing, and open, cultural and civic disobedience. This process contributed to upsetting the balance of power above at the expense of the reformists. They had less room for bargaining, and the ultra-conservatives became more determined to push them out of the circuit of power.
The terrain has now changed for both the rulers and the ruled. The regime has come out of these elections weakened. Those refusing to go to vote were greater than ever [fig 1]. Even official figures agree that on this occasion 65% of the population ignored the call to vote – 50% by staying away and a further 15% through spoilt or blank ballot papers [2]. Thus a majority of the people of Iran have rejected the legitimacy of both its elected and its appointed institutions. Moreover they showed that they will not be cowed by threats and were unafraid to directly confront the ability of the ruling system to control them. They showed their opposition to the ruling system by ignoring what the rulers called a “religious duty” to vote and simultaneously questioned the legitimacy of the regime and its ability to rule.
The elections to the 7th Majles also finalised a new schism in the Islamic government. The split in the ruling bloc and the departure of some of the reformists from government (which took place during the elections) will no doubt increase the isolation of the Islamic Republic and increase its fragility vis a vis internal and external pressures.
Saviours yonder
To regain its balance the regime must seek new post to lean on. This would be difficult to imagine inside the country. There is little leeway in empty rhetoric about fighting poverty, unemployment and deprivation and hollow promises over economic growth. While the regime is clearly bent on the “Chinese model” [3] for reasons that are outside the scope of this article such a notion is neither possible, nor likely to fool the dispossessed and destitute masses into supporting this regime. Nationalist or reformist slogans would similarly fail, as would the policy of distancing itself from “revolutionary” and Islamic values [4], or even the leader centred structure. Such about-turns will do little to stop the rot of isolation of the ruling gangs.
To be flexible towards what have been dubbed social and cultural “limitations” might reduce somewhat clashes we witness every day, or even prevent explosions at this or that point of time, but are far too late to attract women and the young, particularly those belonging to middle and upper layers of society, back into the regime’s fold. However for a regime that is unable to conjure up some support among its own people, the outside world may appear as a saviour.
There is a great deal of evidence that it is trying precisely that. The Islamic regime are more and more being driven to a more “realistic” policy. They hope to increase their chances of survival not just by reducing outside pressure on them, but in seeking active support outside. In the unipolar world of today, particularly after September 11, it is not just Europe they woo, but have opened up avenues for negotiation and compromise with the “Great Satan” itself. Both openly and in secret the regime is laying all its cards on the table.
These cards can be Iraqi Shi’ites or Al Qaeda prisoners. The promise of cheap oil - putting up the oil and gas fields for sale - or “privatising” state institutions and companies. Despite all the problems that exist on this route, for the regime of the ayatollahs who find themselves in ever tightening siege by its own people, compromise with external enemies, including global powers bent on domination, is a safer and more realistic aim.
Alternative strategies below
For the people of Iran and their movement against the Islamic regime, the success of an active and effective election boycott, and the weakening of the regime of ayatollahs, leaves them on a more favourable terrain. Increasingly their movement is becoming totally independent of the regime and the institutions associated with it. It is also freeing itself from the constraints of protesting within the law and the permissible. It is quitting the official channels of “participation” and moving towards collective direct action. It is beginning to express its opposition less in symbolic forms – such as the ballot paper – and more in open and explicit protest. It is moving from demonstrations through the ballot to street demonstrations. It identifies its real interests and demands them directly.
It was not surprising that only a few days after the elections the people of Bam, recently devastated by an earthquake, poured into the streets in revolt against the shortcoming, corruption and incompetence of the organs of the state in dealing with their plight. Or people in Eizeh, Fereidoon-Kenar and some other towns protested against electoral fraud and interference by the Council of Guardians and burnt down government buildings and banks. Or the unprecedented nation-wide one week strike of teachers in primary and middle-schools with demands for better pay, welfare provisions, change in employment conditions, and the right to form an independent trade union.
Conditions are much better than ever to move from a strategy of purely rejecting a regime, from a purely protest movement, into one of that can build, that can stand on its feet. Today the anti-despotic protest movement has cut its umbilical cord from the reformist strategy and is experiencing a formative transformation. Among the signifiers was the fact that people refused to vote for the few reformist candidates who had slipped through the filters of the Council of Guardians and stood as candidates. The pathetic number of votes that the most prominent of these received was the best mirror to their total isolation from the people. Mehdi Karrubi, the speaker of the outgoing Majles, and the leader of the Association of Militant Clergy (Majma Rohaniune Mobarez – one of the main components of the reformist coalition) received little more than 141,000 of Teheran’s 6,047,000 potential electorate – a mere 2.3%. Jamileh Kadivar – who headed the Teheran poll in 2000 – received even less.
While there is no unanimity as to which road and which alternative there is to the Islamic Republic the different currents in the general movement are becoming clearer. Two main currents, two polar opposites, are crystalizing: one pointing in the direction of an elitist government and the other a popular sovereignty.
The first camp, which is not confined to monarchists or secularists, are inclined towards some form of government through an intermediary or guardianship. They do not believe the people have the competence to govern themselves. They do not believe that the people can directly execute social organisation. That they can be directly organised as a ruling power. Nor do they believe that the regime change can take place through a collective mass involvement, that is through a general struggle. For these people the “anti-dictatorial-liberation” movement, or as some like to call t the “civil movement” or the “movement for democracy” is essentially an elitist movement. A movement of the elite.
Spontaneous moves, self organised, without vertical leadership, …. is not merely a handicap and a vehicle for chaos, but also utterly futile. Any effect would be harmful. The people as a force can enter any calculation only after they are “led”, lined up behind particular groupings. The issue at stake is not organisability but leadership.
From this vantage point the knot that needs unravelling in the political crisis facing Iran today is the absence of a political leadership. A leadership that can ride the wave of popular discontent, and in alliance with “global powers” (the global society!) become the alternative to replace the current administration. The existing a fragmented opposition can be overcome through “alliances”– meaning political fronts made up of “personalities”, groups and parties (most with little or no support among the people). Their rallying slogans will go no further than the most basic, and the thoroughly abstract and general, at best a simple negation of the most obvious characteristics of the present regime: namely rejecting a religious state.
For this spectrum parting with the theocratic autocracy, does not always equate with parting with other forms of autocracy: in its elitist, paternalistic or male dominated forms. Nor does it necessarily mean a break with the dictatorship of the market, commodity totalitarianism, corporative autocracy, or imperialist domination seeking. On the contrary, under their umbrellas half a dozen secular dictatorships are being cultivated competing among each other to form the alternative to the ruling theocracy.
Self governing
On the opposite pole, there are those groupings taking shape who desire to set up a popular self-government and envisage one or other form of participatory democracy. They focus on escaping the interminable cycle of autocratic rule, and believe it vital to help establish a system where people rule over themselves, become self-organised as the ruling power and take over the reign of affairs. They believe that outside the circle of the state and the market, there can, and does, exist a force for change and improvement.
This world-view believes that the anti-despotic liberational struggle must be able to translate the negation of autocracy and that of freedom into the varied and pluralistic language of its social base (to break up its abstract and generalised skin). This implies that the alternative system that is to replace the existing one must address the specific interests of workers, women, youth, intellectuals, artists, the national, ethnic and religious and other minorities. It must understand that the source of solidarity is not in uniformity, but the recognition of differences. The liberation movement must evolve into the movement of movements.
For these currents there is a further consideration. In order to evolve the anti-dictatorial movement into one for a radical and participatory democracy it is vital to totally overhaul the existing viewpoints on the structure of power and how it is constructed. To organise the struggle for power from the below upwards, moving through a self-governing structure in a termite like process, thereby eroding the very building of political and social autocracy from the inside. It must be able to extend the sphere of control from below. It must define its own growth by of the growth and spread of “liberated political and social zones”. The foundation of power must be based on empowering people from below, those who live by selling their own labour power, their real participation and self-government.
There are additional views among this spectrum who also add that if the anti-dictatorial movement is to grow and develop it is vital to go beyond home frontiers, and to bind it to the global struggle against despotism, against the domination of capital and imperialist domineering and warmongering. It is vital to belong to that camp which has risen in defiance and against the enslavement of the people of this planet, and has declared war on the globalisation of poverty, inequality, oppression and domination.
The dominance of the participatory project over the anti-dictatorial movement of the people of Iran will not be impossible unless this movement can, in the first instance break with the neo-liberal discourse in the economic reconstruction, the authoritarian means for cultural renewal, and the elitist-centred models in organisation and leadership. Even more central for its growth is to free itself from the current psychological disillusionment, and ideological decrepitude which drives it into simplistic thinking, short cuts and clichés, wrapped up as “rationalism” and “realism” and free itself from paralysis in thought and politics. The road to a popular self government can be opened up, and become irreversible, only through this route.
The next few months are critical ones for all those playing on Iran’s political field. For the regime in order to exploit the last existing opportunities (provided by the limitations on manoeuvring and initiatives imposed on Bush and the neo-conservatives by the setbacks of the Iraqi occupation and the impending US presidential elections). For the popular movement against the Islamic regime it provides an opportunity to firm up the current developments within it and finalise its future moves and directions: will it become a struggle ending in yet another autocracy or one aiming for a radical democracy and a popular self-government.
Editorial – Summer 2004
Footnotes
1. It is only in this light that one can understand why the regime is so desperate to encourage, bully or threaten people to go to the polls, turning voting into a “religious duty”, when it has simultaneously set in place immovable structures that block any attempt to turn that vote into policy or law. Another question which naturally arises here is: if these elected organs are so impotent why bother to vet the candidates by the Council of Giardians. The Majles, in particular, has always had a second function. It was an arena where the various factions of this factious-ridden regime could battle it out over policies and issues. The decision by the ultra-conservatives to do away with this function once and for all by excluding the majority of the “reformist” faction is a vivid illustration of the utter desperation of the system to reproduce itself.
2. Interestingly, even the interior ministry which organises the elections, admits that these figures are a cover up. Far fewer people bothered to vote. The extent of cheating is unprecedented, even for a regime that regularly went in for electoral fraud. The interior ministry conducted a pre-election poll which showed that only 10% said they would definitely vote and more than 71% said they would definitely not go to the polls. In some towns – in Semirom or the Isfahan province for example - the votes that came out of the ballot boxes were 110% of the registered electorates! Former interior minister Ali Akbar Mohtashemi, who headed the election headquarters of the reformist coalition, complained to the Council of Guardians documenting vote rigging in 50 election sites in the capital alone.
3. Some theoreticians in the ultra-conservative faction believe that the popular discontent against the Islamic regime is essentially rooted in unemployment and economic straits. All you need to do to stem the discontent is to fill belies. It is therefore important to separate “economic development” from what is called “cultural” and “political developments”. We can encourage foreign investment in the country with some concessions, without needing to “democratise” the political system. Their inspiration is the Chinese model: free the movement of capital and commodities while keeping a tight lid on the political sphere and maintain the monopoly of power.
4. In previous elections the ultra-conservatives appeared on the scene with such slogans as “obey the Supreme Leader [velayat]” and as followers of the “Imam and Leadership line”. This time they had changed the name of their coalition into “developers” and “constructors” and …Moreover, they constantly relied on such slogans as welfare, happiness, development, expansion, and growth.
