By Dr. Majid Rafizadeh
Iran’s presidential election will be held in less than three weeks and the Guardian Council has approved seven individuals. Candidates in the Iranian regime’s June 18 election include alleged mass murderers, corrupt embezzlers, subjects of both European and American sanctions due to human rights abuses, and people who have been implicated in foreign assassinations and bombings. The presumptive front runner is Ebrahim Raisi, who was one of the leading perpetrators of the massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in 1988.
No wonder the majority of Iranians are expected to reject the election entirely. Various Iranian officials and state media outlets have already warned of this possibility. Beyond that, the election, which is widely regarded as a sham, takes place against the backdrop of major uprisings.
In the final days of 2017, protests broke out in the second city of Mashhad before immediately spreading to dozens of other cities, with democratic change being the rallying cry. At the time, the president-elect of the main Iranian oppositional group, the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), Maryam Rajavi, called for more nationwide protests led by “resistance units” inside Iran.
Another nationwide uprising erupted in November 2019 — and this presented the clerical regime with an even greater challenge. The protests appeared to be highly organized. Terrified of the breadth and organized nature of these uprisings, authorities opened fire on crowds, killing about 1,500 people.
Persistent anger over that crackdown on dissent may have fueled last year’s boycott of the parliamentary election. It is also now emerging as a driving force behind the prospective boycott of next month’s presidential vote.
This fact was recently underscored by a video that circulated on social media, in which the mothers of activists who had been killed during the November 2019 uprising made it clear that their only vote is for the overthrow of the regime. One of the grieving mothers noted that elections have merely served as a facade for the theocratic dictatorship over the course of four decades. “If our vote was supposed to fix anything, it would have happened in the last 40 years, but it did not,” she said. “The past 40 years led to November’s mass murder of the youth, this land’s greatest treasures.”
In recent weeks, retirees and pensioners have staged more than a dozen protests, each spanning multiple cities. The government has offered little to no response to their demands for an economic policy that shrinks the gap between their stagnant income and the rising cost of living. As a result, the most recent of these protests adopted slogans such as: “We have seen no justice; we will not vote anymore.”
Similar slogans were taken up by protesters who focused attention on the regime’s loss of people’s savings in the stock market. Those whose savings were stolen have joined the massed ranks of impoverished Iranians. For them, it was clear that the regime’s graft permeated the political hierarchy and left no one with an interest in reforming the system.
Current President Hassan Rouhani has served as the standard bearer for Iran’s “reformist” faction over the past eight years, but he neither opposed the mass killing of protesters nor criticized the further consolidation of national wealth into a small number of institutions, mostly controlled by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The NCRI has been a leading proponent of election boycotts for many years. In 2013, it fervently pushed back against the narrative in some Western policy circles that held that a “reformist” president might effect meaningful change in Iran’s domestic conduct and its relationship with the international community. This year is no different, as opposition activists have launched a nationwide campaign urging citizens to boycott the election farce. The vast majority of Iranians have unequivocally rejected the reformist narrative and many have taken the logical next step of endorsing regime change and working toward it through the mass uprisings of 2017-2018 and 2019.
Western policymakers and the entire international community should make it clear that they support any effort by the Iranian people to push back against state repression and advocate for democracy. Iranian officials and media outlets have warned about the election boycott and have implicitly raised the prospect of launching an even more aggressive crackdown on dissent to counter what may be the greatest challenge so far to the mullahs’ regime.
Only the immediate and overwhelming threat of a coordinated international response can guarantee that the bloodshed in any forthcoming uprising will not be worse than that which occurred in November 2019. If policymakers make no such threat, they will be turning their backs on the Iranian people and thereby solidifying the position of a nuclear-keen theocratic dictatorship that is desperately struggling to find a lifeline.
- Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a Harvard-educated Iranian-American political scientist. Twitter: @Dr_Rafizadeh
This article was first published by arabnews
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