Iran's current political crisis, triggered by a decision to disqualify thousands of candidates in upcoming election, does not offer either side an easy path to compromise. The ranking Guardian Council has disqualified 44 percent of an upcoming election's potential candidates on nebulous charges. January 21, several ministers and vice presidents resigned in protest over the disqualifications- but the government has not yet accepted the resignations.
President Mohammad Khatami, a reformist, has been stalled by a structure that lets the ultraconservative Guardian Council control new laws and disqualifies candidates for office. This has led to widespread voter apathy in Tehran's municipal elections in 2003. [For background, see the Eurasia Insight archive]. Khatami has pressed for two laws that would expand the president's power and curb the Council's, but these laws have also gotten stuck in process.
The Guardian Council's latest move, which it announced on January 11, prodded many reformists to outrage. Around 100 current legislators, many of whom are among the disqualified, started an indefinite sit-in at the parliamentary building. Since then, 27 provincial governors, 12 ministers and over 100 vice ministers have submitted letters of resignation in protest over the Guardian Council's heavy-handed tactics.
Top thinkers from each group have tried to narrow the differences, although it is not clear that either side will budge. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who heads the Guardian Council, intervened on January 14 to suggest that most incumbents should get to run even if their names appear on the disqualified list. For his part, Khatami told the governors that they should all await the Guardian Council's final list, due on January 31, before resigning. He even hinted that in the face of a rubber-stamp election, he too may resign.
Khamenei, by asking the Guardian Council to conduct its investigations on the presumption of innocence, may be trying to deny reformists the option of depicting the conservatives as unreasonable. Several Council spokesmen have hinted in recent days that around 200 disqualified candidates have been reinstated, with more to follow. On January 22, reports suggested that another 1500 candidates might be reinstated within a day or two. However, this has done nothing to dissuade the legislatures to end their sit-in or withdraw resignation threats. Reformists suspect that conservatives have no intention of allowing a competitive election.
Several reformist leaders believe that after allowing reinstatements, the Guardian Council would target "prominent reformists" for exclusion from the February 20 vote. According to Mohsen Mirdamad, a leader of the reformist faction in the current legislature, nearly 200 of the 290 seats contested are already slated for conservative candidates. "The Guardian Council is determined to stop all well-known and prominent reformists from running," he recently told an interviewer: such a tactic could effectively muzzle the reformists.
Since the Islamic revolution of 1979, a tiny proportion of lawmakers- usually 15 to 25- have shaped debates and set the agenda. By eliminating the best-organized and best-known reformists from the next parliament, conservatives would leave the reformists weakened and quiet. This would probably lead the reformists' base, already alienated by the slow pace of reform, to grow more apathetic. [For background, see the Eurasia Insight archive].
In response, reformists could play to popular sentiment by carrying out a mass resignation and branding the conservatives as reactionary. Despite threats to this effect, though, they would probably not go through with it since they define themselves by their faith in the democratic system. A mass resignation or vote boycott would express despair with that system.
Many experts see the resignation announcements and sit-in as gestures designed to extract maximum concessions from the conservatives before the election season starts in February. "These are in all likelihood posturing by the reformists with the purpose of gaining maximum advantage before a final agreement on the election situation is reached," an Iranian political scientist told EurasiaNet. According to the academic, who insisted on anonymity, most every Iranian has expected a mass disqualification attempt for several months. "What is surprising is how both sides have dug their heels," said the political scientist.
Reports surfaced that a hard-line judge recently asked the Interior Ministry for the names of all officials who have threatened to quit- a sign that these individuals may face prosecution. If the Guardian Council does anything less than prosecute or win, it might lose the support of some voters and the fear of others.
At the same time, the Guardian Council's intransigence has emboldened a moderate faction to side more firmly with the reformists. The Association of Combatant Clerics, which counts Khatami as a member, announced on January 19 that its members would boycott the election unless the Guardian Council reverses the disqualifications. The usually placid speaker of parliament, Mehdi Karoubi, said that he would never take part in a rubber-stamp election. If the reformists keep alive the threat of a boycott, then conservatives may also refuse to compromise. Both sides may feel that with term limits due to bar Khatami from running in 2005, there is little to lose from taking a stand.
The key question is what would befall the country under a fully conservative government. According to Sadegh Zibakalam, a professor of political science at the University of Tehran, the conservatives might take steps to promote the availability of consumer goods while embarking on an iron-fist policy of political repression.
The conservatives would be able to pursue such a program before the eyes of the world, Zibakalam believes, because "the Europeans are more interested in [monitoring Iran's nuclear program]" and the United States "would be only too eager to work with a strong Iranian government to get custody of al Qaeda detainees in Iran and extricate itself from the mess in Iraq." This view presumes that European and American leaders would refrain from exerting any serious pressure on undemocratic forces in the Iranian government.
Editor's note:
Ardeshir Moaveni is a freelance journalist specializing in Iranian politics.
