On March 14, Iranians will head to the polls to participate in parliamentary elections – or a charade, depending on who one asks.  Over 7,000 Iranians declared their candidacy for a seat in the Majlis, Iran’s legislative body.  However, more than 2,000 candidates, primarily from the reformist wing of Iran’s political scene, have been disqualified.  This has essentially ensured a victory for conservative hard-liners loyal to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Through its alliance with Syria and its funding of Hezbollah, Iran is one of the most influential foreign powers with a stake in the political outcome in Lebanon. Several recent reports in the Arab media have suggested that Ahmadinejad is keen to extend the Lebanese stalemate until 2009. Though the Majlis does not directly determine Iranian foreign policy, the results could affect Iran’s strategy in the region and foreshadow the outcome of the Iranian presidential election in June 2009.

Iran’s political system contains a built-in tension between democratic and undemocratic institutions.  During the years of President Mohammad Khatami, the reformists were largely ascendant in the popularly elected circles of power.  A purge of reformist representatives in 2004, largely similar to the disqualifications in the current election campaign, paved the way for a conservative takeover of the Majlis.  President Ahmadinejad’s victory in 2005 consolidated the hard-liners’ control over all levers of power.

 “Reformists realize that in order to save the system as a whole – because it has run into a deep crisis of legitimacy at this point – they need to change it; they need to open it up politically [and] convince the ordinary populace that the political system has answers to their demands,” said Kaveh Ehsani, a research scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago and the co-editor of the Tehran-based journal Goft-e-gu.  Broadly understood, Ehsani stated, the conservatives represent many clerical and business interests who have an interest in maintaining the power of the current elite and strive to preserve the Islamic regime’s strict social codes.

The pre-election elimination of many reformist and centrist candidates shows that Iran’s hard-liners have no intention of relinquishing control of the government.   The primary reformist coalition, inspired by Khatami, estimated that they would be able to contest only around half of the Majlis seats.  While Iranian elections have never been completely free or fair, the disqualifications this year, and in the 2004 election, far outstrip the exclusions in previous elections.  The government rejected the candidacies of almost all of the recognized reformists prior to this election, including former cabinet ministers and representatives sitting in the current parliament. 

With the reformists’ political strength largely neutralized, a conservative split with Ahmadinejad has produced most of the drama surrounding this election.  The Iranian president’s vitriolic anti-Israel and anti-American rhetoric has alienated many of his previous supporters.  These politicians, such as Tehran Mayor Muhammad Qalibaf and former nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani, are less driven by ideological zeal and more concerned about Iranian isolation and lack of trading partners.  “I would not be surprised if this parliament changes drastically, probably predominated by a coalition of more pragmatic conservatives, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Ahmadinejad loses next year’s elections in a landslide,” said Ehsani.

But with Iran’s political space tightening even further and the power of the unelected clerics so great, some observers consider these “elections” no more than a sham.  “There are no elections, there is a circus,” commented Michael Ledeen, a resident scholar at the hawkish American Enterprise Institute in Washington D.C.  “Iran is a theocratic dictatorship in which the theocratic leadership decides who is going to hold what position.  Every now and then, they put on these shows, which they pretend are elections.”

Ledeen has argued that the United States should support revolution in Iran, in much the same way that it gave support to democratic reformers in the former Communist states of Poland and Czechoslovakia.  Indeed, there are signs that the Iranian public holds considerably more liberal views than their elected and unelected leaders.  A poll conducted last month by the American nonprofit Terror Free Tomorrow, along with the international polling company D3 Systems, found that 86% of Iranians believe that the position of the Supreme Leader, currently held by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, should be popularly elected.  Khamenei, who is the single most powerful leader in Iran, was appointed by a panel of religious scholars.  The same poll also found that while Iranians were largely supportive of the Islamic regime’s support for Hezbollah, opinion is far from unanimous.  61% of Iranians surveyed said they supported the Iranian regime’s military and financial support of Hezbollah, but 32% stated that they opposed it.

“In general, the poll suggests that we are dealing with a population that is diverse and, while appreciative of reform in important areas of public life, not necessarily uniformly or even mostly disillusioned,” noted Farideh Farhi, author of States and Urban-Based Revolutions: Iran and Nicaragua and an adjunct professor of political science at University of Hawaii – Manoa.  “I do, however, think that the Iranian public in general is more ‘liberal’ or centrist than the current administration in power and am watching this election to see if the population votes for a correction in the centrist direction.”

Like most elections in Iran, the central issues in this campaign are domestic affairs.  Iranians cheered Hezbollah’s performance in the 2006 Lebanon war but are generally more concerned with improving their own economic situation than supporting radical groups throughout the region.  “There was a sense of outrage you would hear…among ordinary people, of all different views and classes,” stated Ehsani.   “The state was promising to funnel hundreds of millions of dollars for reconstruction in Lebanon…while [Iranians] were in real economic dire straits.”

Iran is not a democracy, and the economic concerns of its citizens do not automatically translate into state action.  Powerful, unelected figures look out for their own interests, and the democratic choice of Iranians is severely limited to a narrow range of candidates of varying degrees of fundamentalism.  Nevertheless, Iran is not an autocracy in the mold of Egypt or Syria.  Popular opinion has the ability to sway important government leaders, and increasing acts of government repression endangers the Islamic regime’s fragile base of support.  For all these reasons, the Iranian elections should be watched with a jaded eye – but carefully.