Iran's take on democracy and the Iranians that refused to play along - opinion

• Published date: 11 March 2024
• Author: NEVILLE TELLER
• Publication title: Jerusalem Post, The: Web Edition Articles (Israel)

Even so, the BBC published comments from voters skeptical of the official announcement. One said: "It's not the real result." Another woman declared "People believe it's actually less than 41%." When asked what she thought the true turnout had been, she said comments on Instagram suggested as low as 20%. "Some even say 15%," she added

Some experts agreed. "The real turnout is likely lower," wrote Alex Vatanka, founding director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute in Washington, "although it is impossible to know at this stage." The Stimson Center was even more circumspect. "Due to press and media censorship," it commented, "as well as the absence of independent observers, it is challenging to verify the authenticity of these statistics."

The poll was held to elect the 290 members of the national parliament, the Majles, and the 88 clerics who make up the Assembly of Experts, composed exclusively of male Islamic scholars. Each member of the assembly will sit for a term of eight years and, should the occasion arise, be tasked with selecting the country's supreme leader. The occasion may indeed arise. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is 85 years old, and rumors about his health have been circulating since 2022.

The election results indicate that conservative politicians will dominate the next parliament, which is scarcely surprising given the tightly controlled procedures under which candidates are vetted as suitable to run in the elections. This preelection task is undertaken by the country's constitutional watchdog, the powerful Guardian Council, half of whose members are directly selected by Khamenei.

In fact, of the 15,200 people who registered to stand in the election, no fewer than 7,296 were disqualified, some of them well-known critics of the regime, many of them moderates and reformers.

Iranian women have demonstrated more than once to the regime that they are a force to be reckoned with, and the Guardian Council acknowledged reality by allowing 666 women to stand.

Boycotting the polls

The popular mood during the preelection campaign was somber. Powerful voices called on the nation to boycott the forthcoming polls. One with particular appeal was that of the imprisoned Narges Mohammadi, who won the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize for her work fighting the oppression of women in Iran. She denounced the elections as a sham, following what she called the "ruthless and brutal suppression" of the 2022 protests triggered by the death in custody of...