Moderate Forces Advance in Iran?
Hardliners fail to sweep Iran vote, Candidates allied to Ahmadinejad have failed to sweep the polls
Candidates allied to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s president, have failed to score a resounding victory over moderate forces in twin Iranian elections, according to initial results.Voting for the Assembly of Experts, the body that chooses the supreme leader, and the Tehran city council concluded on Saturday.
Centrist cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani appeared to have sprung a surprise by reaping more votes than a hardline rival in the election for the Assembly of Experts.
In the Tehran city council, reformists were on course to take a handful of seats and end total conservative domination.
In Tehran city itself, Rafsanjani was more than 400,000 votes ahead of the second placed cleric, the ISNA news agency reported, citing official figures.
His popularity appears to have been helped by a growing alliance with reformists, such as Mohammad Khatami, a former president.
…Moderates were a strong force under Khatami’s presidency, when at one point reformists dominated parliament and local councils.
The reformists reached their lowest ebb in the 2005 presidential election, when their candidates went out in the first round.
Do we have any experts in the audience who can interpret the meaning of this election?
11 Responses to “Moderate Forces Advance in Iran?”
Good pre-election background article in Arab News pointed out by Citizen Smash last week.
Tully,
I posted that article on TMV earlier in the week.
Sorry, Paul, but y’all post so much over here I can’t keep up with it all. TMV be crowded.
But it’s good to see I’m not the only one watching the internal politics in Iran, where events put a somewhat different face on Ahmadinejad’s public rantings than the impression you’d get from just the more prominent MSM stories. Especially the suspicious number of “unfortunate accidents” that have plagued the Khamenei/Revolutionary Guard faction over the last few years. Seems the best way to be in a plane crash in Iran is to fly with upper-level members of the Revolutionary Guard….one would almsot think they chose their maintenance crews for their religious piety rather than their airframe expertise. If you assume the accidents were all accidents, of course.
I didn’t see your post here until I’d already posted elsewhere on the Iranian elections using the AFP/Breitbart article as sourcing. It’s interesting to see the crossover between the two articles–Al Jazeera seems to have been cribbing a bit from AFP.
Elsewhere, the Iranian Resistance factions are bragging about their own boycott of the elections and claiming that the results were padded with “zombie voting” and other such tactics. Seems like somewhat forced bravado to me–I don’t see how much “change” they accomplish by not voting at all and then bragging about their non-participation.
Thanks Tully, I hope more people with genuine understanding of the dynamics over there weigh in.
I wonder what our state department thinks of this and is doing about it? Talking with enemies is also a way to reach potential allies.
From our point of view Iran elected a madman who is belligerent, ignorant, pompous. stubborn, and imperialistic.
From an Iranian point of view they may see the same thing over here.
Both sides are hoping we survive our leaders.
I suspect State (and other less, um, overt branches of government) are keeping close track. I won’t speculate in too detailed a fashion on what they might be doing about it, but there’s plenty of civil unrest and some outright sabotage going on in Iran, particularly of gas pipelines in the north and oil pipelines in the south. And there are certainly anti-regime factions to which we may or may not be giving some support.
We tend to see Iran as a maniacal monolith. In reality, it’s pretty unstable, and much more ethnically fractured than Syria (or Iraq). Which begs the queston–are they more dangerous to the region as a solid united theocracy, or as a wobbly divided one?
The thing that I don’t like about Iran is that that someone in the Iranian government might get the bright idea that a direct confrontation with the United States will rally the people behind the clergy. Internal turmoil is about the only thing we have going for us. Considering how many factions there are to Iranian society I don’t know if there enough groups to form an opposition that could actually challenge the authority of the government.
The Moderates would have won last time had Bush not declared Iran part of the Axis of Evil and were next after Iraq. These idiots know nothing of diplomacy and international relations.
Hell, just watch Godfather. You need a different type of Consiglieri during wartime. If you think you will be under attack, you go for the hardline leader that will protect you.
This puts a smile on my face, its nice to see signs of change and signs of hope for a more peaceful middle east.
Paul,
From our point of view Iran elected a madman who is belligerent, ignorant, pompous,stubborn and imperialistic.
From an Iranian point of view they may see the same thing over here.
My point of view is that they elected someone who has the same characteristics as Bush in order to give Americans their own medicine. And also to prove to the world that they can stand shoulder to shoulder with Americans in all fields. The only thing they lack in that respect is nuclear arms. And if the world is so indifference to world’s real problems, it will not be long before Iranians go nuke.
There is nothing US alone can do to deter Iran. The world has gone so soft that it will not be awakened unless a massive disaster hits the world, something much much bigger than 9/11.
As far as I am concerned, there are no moderates among the clergy.
Yet in their Theocracy, moderates get elected!?
Ok in the last election a lot of the moderate canidates got thrown out. This lead to a lot of folks in protest boycotting the election (as well as some alleged monkeyshines by the government)
Of the upper level Ayatollahs several of them have become less convinced this is the way they should lead Iran. So they have let up some of the restrictions and allowed more of the moderate candidates into the race. In turn the boycotting also stopped.
The President is not all hugs and kisses from the other Theocrats. Some view his position as very bad.
And to the Person who said they turned on us when we said Iran was part of the Axis of evil. A protest of nearly 2 million people around the same time was chanting “Death to the Taliban in Kabul and Tehran” while waving US flags
somehow I don’t think they minded so much