Iran's conservatives unsurprisingly win legislative elections with record abstention

This Monday, Iran released the official results of the legislative elections held last Friday, in which the conservatives renewed the comfortable majority they had in Parliament during the last legislature, with 232 seats out of 290. The country’s Electoral Commission has announced that 245 of that total number in the running have been elected in the first round and that the majority of them have gone to conservative candidates, according to the official IRNA agency. These elections have recorded the lowest turnout in the history of the Islamic Republic. The official figure stands at 41% of the 61 million Iranian voters. In past electoral events, turnout at the polls had sometimes exceeded 70% of potential voters.

The results have not been a surprise. Only about 30 candidates considered moderate or reformist—those who defend greater openness of the Islamic regime—had passed the Guardian Council’s prior screening, while the vast majority of them had been disqualified. The Guardian Council is an institution made up of 12 members, half appointed directly by the Iranian Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, while its other six members are elected, after approval by Parliament, for another position appointed directly by Khamenei: the head of the judiciary.

The Reform Front, which brings together around twenty reformist organizations, had given up running in these elections, which it defined as “meaningless and not free.” Professors, students, politicians and activists, such as the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Narges Mohammadi, had also urged a boycott.

Furthermore, 5% of Friday’s votes were invalid, according to Interior Minister Ahmed Vahidi at a press conference. Some Iranian media cited by Reuters, however, raised the number of invalid ballots to 30%. In some constituencies, in which the candidates did not obtain the minimum of 20% of the votes cast, a second round will be held in April, Vahidi announced. In Tehran, which has 30 seats in Parliament, this second round of elections must be held for 16 seats.

Power quotas

Professor at the Center for Gulf Studies at Qatar University Luciano Zaccara considers that the fact that the “reformist opposition” has not been present “in the electoral political landscape” does not mean “that competition in the elections has disappeared.” In his opinion, in the Iranian elections, “what is being settled are the power shares of the various conservative factions, which are far from being a common front.”

The practical absence of voices critical of the regime among the candidates has been added to the fact that these elections – in which the members of the body that must elect the successor of the supreme leader, the Assembly of Experts – were also elected, have been the first after the latest protests against the regime in Iran. These demonstrations broke out on September 16, 2022, the day of the death in police custody of Mahsa Yina Amini, a 22-year-old girl who had been detained in Tehran three days earlier. Her arrest was due to what is a crime in the Islamic country: wearing the veil incorrectly, which, by law, must hide the hair.

The protests, which very soon acquired as slogans the slogan of Kurdish origin “Woman, life and freedom” and others such as “Death to the dictator” or “Mullahs, perdeos”, could only be quelled with repression. At least 500 people were killed by paramilitaries and security forces, according to Iranian human rights organizations in exile. Many Iranians, according to these NGOs, lost one or both eyes due to shots fired by these forces. More than 22,000 people were arrested and eight men have so far been executed by hanging in connection with the protests.

The rejection shown by the protesters and the poor economic situation of the country, whose latest inflation data in autumn rose to 56%, made the Iranian authorities fear a low participation. The surveys placed the possible turnout at the polls in a range between 30% and 41%. The official data has been placed at the best of those options, 41%, 25 million voters, which a survey by the ruling Iranian Students Polling Agency (ISPA) had offered last week.

Since the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, ruled in 1979 that the popular vote is “the measure of the policies of the State,” the country’s leaders had used the high participation data in previous elections to legitimize themselves. and demonstrate popular support for the Iranian political system, in which elected republican institutions, such as Parliament, coexist with others of an Islamic theocracy, such as the figure of the supreme leader.

Although Friday’s participation figure is even worse than that of the 2021 presidential elections, which barely exceeded 42% and was the worst recorded until then, the president of Iran, Ebrahim Raisi, highlighted in a statement on Saturday that The elections have meant “a big no” to the “anti-humanist front of arrogance”, in reference to the West. Raisí was one of those hard-line candidates who also monopolized the lists of 144 candidates for the 88 seats in the Assembly of Experts. In these elections, the head of the Iranian Government has revalidated his position.

The preselection of candidates for the Assembly of Experts had been even more restrictive than for Parliament, in what some analysts interpret as an attempt to preserve the the state in which after the death of the supreme leader, aged 84. Even former president Hassan Rohani had been banned from re-election in that Assembly that will elect Khamenei’s successor, after his death.

Professor Zaccara considers that, in the Persian country, legislative elections have generally been “a mechanism for resolving conflicts within the political elite.” As the veto against candidates like Rohani points out, “the ideological base of that elite has been greatly reduced,” argues this Iran specialist.

Political scientist Ali Alfoneh, of the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, agrees by email that “the regime’s inner circle [iraní] It is increasingly narrow, and many elite groups, which once loyally served the Islamic Republic, have become politically marginalized. On the one hand, this evolution theoretically facilitates decision-making, since a smaller group of people with similar political opinions governs the State. On the other hand, the reduction of the ruling elites makes the regime less representative of the population, undermines its legitimacy and widens the gap between the state and Iranian society.”

Follow all the international information on Facebook y Xor our weekly newsletter.