A Bad Election for Ahmadinejad
The overall results of Friday’s Iranian parliamentary elections — a victory for the conservatives – were essentially a forgone conclusion.
Under the current law, conservatives are allowed to have at least one, if not more candidates competing for any of the 290 seats in the Majiles — the Iranian parliament.
Meanwhile their main rivals, the reformists, were only allowed to compete for 120 seats — it is impossible for them to gain a majority.
They’ve been operating with that handicap ever since Ayatollah Khamenei Iran’s supreme leader, culled their number before the elections. After the student riots of 2000, which took place during the presidency of the reformist Ayatollah Khatami, Khamenei started to lose trust in them. This is why he has worked ever since to marginalize them in Iranian politics.
So far, preliminary results from Iran show the conservatives won a majority of the seats, exactly as planned by the supreme leader.
However, the results are not neccessarily good news for the conservatives — and especially not for their leader President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.
Despite their built-in disadvantage, it appears that the reformists have managed to win nearly 60 seats in the new Majles elected on Saturday. This represents a 200% increase compared to the last Majles, which ran from 2004 — 2008.
The result can be interpreted as a sign that opposition against Ahmadinejad is growing at a rapid pace amongst the people in Iran, and as a result, in the Majles, which is one of Iran’s most influential domestic political institutions.
President Ahmadinejad has no one else but himself to blame for this development. His badly managed economic policies, and failure to fight corruption have quite possibly made him more enemies than he could afford at the next presidential elections. His bellicose statements against Israel and the West have also damaged his credibility inside Iran, albeit to a lesser extent. To the people of Iran, their economic welfare is far more important.
Sadly for Ahmadinejad, it is not just his political rivals who are turning against him.
His former comrades in the Principalist (Osulgarayan) movement are following suit.
Why? Before the elections, Ahmadinejad decided to split ranks — and in their view — stab them in the back — by forming his own coalition within the party.
In reaction, a group of more moderate conservatives led by former nuclear negotiator Ali Larjani and Tehran’s mayor, formed a conservative coalition which in many regions ran for seats against Ahmadinejad’s allies — and succeeded.
This split in the conservative camp will mean that in the next Majles, Ahmadinejad will not only have to worry about opposition his reformist foes, he now also has to worry about his conservative “comrades” who are expected to take a sizable number of seats in the parliament.
All in all it looks like 2008 is going to be a tough year for the Iranian president, who is hemorraging supporters.
For his sake, he better hope that Iran’s supreme leader doesn’t join them them. The day that happens is the day Ahmadinejad will have to start packing his bags.
Meir Javedanfar is the co-author with Yossi Melman ofThe Nuclear Sphinx of Tehran – Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and the State of Iran. He runs Middle East Economic and Political Analysis (Meepas)
Aren’t we going to bitch about the type of democracy they have over there? it looks alot like Zimbabwe to me. But then, democracy is in the eye of the beholder.
student upprising took place in July 1999 and not in 2000 as the author suggests.
Focusing on the myriad “student uprisings” which happen periodically in Iran, and extrapolating that they have the slightest thing to do with the trajectory of Iran’s leadership or the extremism of Islam in that nation is infantile. At the same moment these students were supposedly protesting the regime — another band of students were raising money to behead the cartoonists who drew the motoons. This type of blinkered nonsense has led us down the garden path for nearly 30 years with all the breathless predictions that “the Mullahs are weakening!” or “the Mullah’s are about to fall!”…
Eventually it wears very thin — we should never take such analysts seriously. Further, as the Islamic nazis ruling Iran consolidate their grip on power — this “analysts” is actually retailing the silliness that it has been “A BAD ELECTION FOR AHMADINEJAD”
So who are you gonna believe, Mr. Javedanfar or your lying eyes? My lying eyes tell me Iran is continuing to slide into the gutter, the students are not where our attention should be focused, and Iranian Islamic Jihad will bring about a global conflagration if they are not destroyed first.