Iran: Another Election.

Yassamine Mather writes on the latest rather odd elections in Iran: how would you like it if all candidates for the Dail had to be approved by the Catholic Church? In these elections which were confined to conservatives, Khamenis faction won 75% of the seats leaving Ahmadinejad isolated. What does this mean for the people of iran? Yassamine says: For now, the supreme leader has got his way. Craven ‘reformists’ will not stop him; and imperialist sanctions, sabotage and war will only make things worse. Only the Iranian masses can put an end to this blood-soaked regime. Full text at link.

Iran’s Islamic constitution automatically bars anyone objecting to the theocratic nature of the state from standing for election and, as a result, parliamentary and presidential elections have often been used by the electorate to express their discontent with the more powerful factions of the religious state. Since 1997 this has been expressed in votes for ‘reformist’ candidates - not necessarily to support ‘reformism’, but, since it represented the lesser of two evils, to express discontent with more conservative factions.

The parliamentary election just completed was different: for the first time in more than a decade the choice was between complex lists of conservative factions only. Like Shia Islam, itself the product of factional infighting, over the last 12 months - as ‘reformists’ were manoeuvred out of the official political scene - the conservatives and ‘principlists’ split and split again. In the words of one ayatollah: “We wanted to create a unified, single principlist faction, but we ended with 16 to 17 factions fighting the principlist corner.”