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Editorial Learning from Iran's election
June 23rd, 2005 -- As a spectator sport, politics usually only really comes into its own at election time. For those who cannot fail to be fascinated by the choices people make and who are thrilled by the unravelling of the outcome, the combination of politics and intricate mathematics as results become known makes for serious entertainment. Nowadays, the whole experience is very much enhanced by the electronic media and that most infuriating facet of the modern election campaign, the opinion polls. But of course elections are not just sport, or at least they are not supposed to be. When Senator Kerry took on George W. Bush for a place in the White House last year, the world watched a tight race with baited breath. When Tony Blair went to the British people to seek an extended mandate last month, even an apparent foregone conclusion attracted large TV audiences on election night. In both those cases, the opinion polls were of decidedly limited use in predicting the result. But the polls’ shortcomings in these cases pales into insignificance compared to the spectacular failure of polls, press, politicians and pundits alike to call the recent presidential election in Iran. Written off almost until the campaign got under way as a non-event by most outside observers, the intricacies of the contest, and indeed its political significance, became ever more apparent as polling day approached. By 17 June, the result was thought — wrongly — to be more or less sewn up, albeit with the numbers close enough to make at the least the runner-up difficult to predict. Like most elections in most countries, what the numbers actually mean, and why people voted for who they did, will be the subject of debate for some time to come and the outcome may never be satisfactorily explained. But there are some obvious lessons to be drawn. For example, it appears to have gone largely unnoticed, most tellingly by Iranian analysts, that much of the country’s population lives in some degree of poverty in the countryside, that many, perhaps most, of these people support the present political system in Iran and that few of them are liable to be attracted by the reformists’ arguments per se. Many of them, furthermore, are poor enough to be swayed by a candidate who promises to dole out to everybody even as modest a monthly stipend as $55. Perhaps one enduring legacy of this election will be the emergence of the rural vote as a significant political factor. Also contributing to Mostafa Moin’s poor showing and the lacklustre campaign he waged appears to have been the fact he was strapped for cash in comparison to some of his rivals, particularly Rafsanjani, a wealthy and powerful individual in his own right. But, by contrast, it seems to have been the unostentatious nature of Ahmadinejad’s campaign that attracted so many younger voters. Another universal concern at election time is turn-out. In the West democracy is judged to have triumphed if two thirds of those on the register turn out on the day to vote. At 62% the turn-out in Iran was certainly a triumph, by this criterion, for the Islamic republican system as a whole. It does not mean that 62% of Iranians support that system, merely that this number of people felt motivated to exercise their democratic right within it. The high turn-out, however, must be a major disappointment for President Bush. Last autumn a number of commentators expressed the belief that the unequivocal international hostility to Bush’ candidacy was a significant factor in his re-election. Similarly, Bush’s public dismissal of the Iranian process was credited by many analysts with being a significant stimulus to voter turn-out. The day before the first round of voting Bush said the election was undemocratic: “Power is in the hands of an unelected few who have retained power through an electoral process that ignores the basic requirements of democracy”. The day after, he denounced it as a sham which ignored “basic democratic standards”. While there should be few illusions about the many obvious shortcomings of the Iranian political system, it does at least give people some say in the running of the state, a defence one could make equally for the American political system, whose many shortcomings, it seems, do not prevent its leaders from pointing the finger at a state which happens to be perceived, and portrayed, as hostile. |
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