EL GACETILLERO LAZARILLO

I was shocked to wake up on Saturday to news of Ahmadinejad’s victory. For one, the results hadn’t been due  until Sunday. And for another, I hadn’t thought that his support had survived years of his bungling economic mismanagement, regardless of Iran’s culture wars.

More crucially, I hadn’t believed that the state would be brazen enough to steal the election - because I assumed that it would be impossible to control the ensuing unrest.

While it is hard to prove anything from my distant vantage point in London, it does seem quite probable that the voting was rigged. As Juan Cole has pointed out, it seems strange that the electoral candidates didn’t even carry their home provinces. Renard Sexton of fivethirtyeight.com has picked up on the same issue, illustrating graphically quite how at odds this year’s election results are with those from 2005.

Meanwhile I am told that the president of the Iranian election commission has himself said that the elections should be annulled - though my Farsi is non-existent and I’m unable to translate the report myself.

In any event, it seems to me that the clique centered on Khamenei overestimated the collapse of Iran’s more liberal tendency over the first half of this decade. I wrote about that decline back in 2004 for the sadly-defunct ak13.com - you can read the original version here, courtesy of Google’s cache.

While some elements of my analysis now make me cringe - I was more idealistic back then - the core of it bears repetition.

When Khatami was elected, the liberal tendency thought that he would usher in the reforms that they wanted - reforms that would have made the state more transparent, that would have loosened the stranglehold on power of the veterans of the 1979 revolution, and that would have reduced the intrusion of the state into Iranian’s private lives.

However, the conservative tendency amongst the 1979 veterans successfully blocked Khatami’s reform programme - for the power structures in Iran are more or less explicitly designed to afford that clique a veto over the rest of the system.

Twice - in 1999 and 2003 - young Iranians took to the streets to protest the stymieing of their elected representative’s mandate. Twice, Khatami distanced himself from the protests; twice they petered out. For those who were around in 1979, the memory of the carnage in the streets is still strong.

And back then, people still believed that Khatami could prevail, which is another reason why those protests petered out without gaining traction. In 2004, though, any remaining hopes were dashed after the guardianship council banned half of the candidates in the parliamentary elections, cementing conservative control over the legislature and ensuring that Khatami’s reforms could never pass into law.

The sense of disillusion was palpable. Turnout in the 2004 parliamentary elections was 60%, down from the 80% who voted in the presidential elections in 1997 and the 67% who voted in 2001. Only about 48% voted in the 2005 presidential elections that put Ahmadinejad in power.

But Khamenei misjudged the mood this year. While many Iranians may merely have grumbled under a conservative technocrat, they rankled under the presidency of a strident, bumbling ideologue, and were resolved to unseat him at the first opportunity. Hence the febrile atmosphere in the days leading up to the election - and the determination of the protesters now to make their voices heard.

And the protests this year are different to the ones of 1999 and 2003. n The movement is much broader than in those years, when it was largely made up of Teherani students - this time around, all segments of society are taking part, and reports suggest that there are protests in major cities across the country.

More importantly, Moussavi has embraced the movement - as have other opposition figures - rather than leaving it to twist in the wind.

Where things go from here remains unclear. The government can avert a major crisis by annulling the election - but at the cost of Ahmadinejad’s legitimacy, if not that of Ali Khamenei. Or it can repress the protesters brutally - maintaining power, but at the cost of the legitimacy of Iran’s entire political system.