The election of a chief is the last link in a process that began after the “victory of the revolution”

German researcher: Iran's "political community" has shrunk for decades

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The German researcher of Iranian origin, Hoshang Shihabi, has monitored what he sees as a shrinkage of the "political community" in Iran, explaining that the victory of the head of the judiciary in the Islamic Republic, Ibrahim Raisi, in the recent presidential elections constitutes the last link in a process that began immediately after the victory of the Islamic Revolution. 1979.

In an analysis published by the American Wilson Research Institute, Shihabi, a researcher in Iranian studies at the Frederick S. Bardi School of Global Studies at Boston University, where he works as a professor of international relations and history, says that by “political society” he means the institutional space in which political actors compete for the legitimate right. In exercising control over public power and over the state apparatus.

Given the revolutionary nature of the regime change in 1979, supporters of the Shah, and those who might have feared him, but who were supporters of the 1906 constitution, were excluded from Iran's "political community".

The decline of the revolutionary coalition

But soon the revolutionary coalition itself began to narrow, as first the secular followers of the late Prime Minister Muhammad Mossadeq, then the left, and finally Mosaddegh's religious followers, were excluded from the political competition.

By the mid-1980s, Iran's "political society" included three factions: the radicals who intended to redistribute wealth, the conservatives who advocated strict adherence to Sharia, and among these were the centrist pragmatists who advocated economic and social liberalization.

Over the course of nearly two decades, the three factions competed with each other in elections, and by the mid-1990s it seemed that genuine electoral competition might gradually lead to democracy, especially since former radicals became more moderate and called themselves reformists.

From 1997 to 2001, Shihabi says, conservatives lost all elections, often by a large margin.

Nevertheless, optimistic observers have ignored the Iranian constitution, which provides for competitive elections, but does not guarantee that elected officials will gain much power, but rather grants real power to unelected bodies controlled by clerics from the Twelver Shiite sect, in the lead among them the Supreme Leader. .

Conservative concern

However, the limited developments towards a more open society worried conservatives, who realized that to thwart reform they would have to return to the undemocratic institutions they had controlled.

One of the ways they did this was to vet candidates for positions that needed to be elected.

Beginning in 2004, they were able to systematically prevent most reformists from running in elections.

Thus, the “political society” became limited to conservative factions and a few centrists, and one of the latter group, President Hassan Rouhani, won the presidential elections in 2013, and then again in 2017.

Earlier this year, the Conservatives concluded that in order to achieve their goal, only a few Conservatives should be allowed to run in the race, and even some prominent Conservatives who ran in the past should be excluded.

The only exception was a largely unknown centrist candidate, Abdel Nasser Hemmati.

But it was Raisi who won this time and that was to be expected.

The turnout rate in the last elections was low, and the three conservative candidates received the support of only 43% of all registered voters.

Iranian society's discontent now extends beyond the urban middle class, and even former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for a boycott of the elections.

A third support the hardliners

And researcher Shihabi says that it should not be overlooked that if the official statistics are correct, this means that there are still more than a third of the population supporting the hardliners in Iran.

Given the division of those who do not support them, this is sufficient for the conservatives to remain in power, especially since they enjoy the support of the repressive apparatus in the state, in the forefront of which is the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

The researcher believes that the political society in Iran is now more homogeneous than ever, as all the pillars of power are in the hands of hard-line conservatives.

If one tends to look on the positive side of any failure, one might see that the homogeneity that exists in the ranks of the ruling elite may facilitate interaction with the West more rationally, but nevertheless, better relations with the West will not represent a victory for any faction over its rivals.

This scenario is certainly possible, as Shihabi wrote, but one must remember that such controversy arose when Ahmadinejad won the presidential election in 2005. Over the course of his eight years in power, relations with the West deteriorated, after they had improved somewhat.

Likewise, Ahmadinejad's victory over his centrist rival in 2005 did not herald an era of peace and harmony among Iran's rulers. On the contrary, no Iranian president has challenged the supreme leader since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran as Ahmadinejad did, although analysts initially believed that he He owes full loyalty to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.

structural tension

Although the constitution establishes a clear division between the Supreme Leader and the president, who ranks below him, it is known that the tension that has characterized the relationship between the two parties since the death of Ayatollah Khomeini is structural.

If this is the case, problems may arise between Raisi and Khamenei, and this may happen, which is widely believed, if the elected president aspires to become the Supreme Leader himself, in which case he will have to compete with Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the current leader, who He enjoys broad support among his father's lining.

Over the past two decades, Iran's political community has shrunk and become more homogeneous, with conservatives slowly amassing control and finding an increasingly assertive IRGC ally, yet personal animosities among its remaining members are strong, and at least the political maneuvering will continue.

Concluding the analysis, Al-Shihabi says that in early 2011, no one would have expected the Arab uprisings, and similarly at the beginning of 2020, no one would have expected the extent to which the Corona epidemic crisis had reached.

The researcher stresses that one can predict the future of politics in Iran, but it is reckless to reach reliable expectations, especially since the country faces existential problems much greater than the shrinkage of the “political society,” such as drought, disease and pollution.

At the end of the analysis, Shihabi cited a rhetorical sentence of an old sage, in which he said: “The future development of things depends on how these things will go.”

• Iranian society's discontent now extends beyond the urban middle class, and even former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for a boycott of the elections.

• The political community in Iran is now more homogeneous than ever, as all the pillars of power are in the hands of hard-line conservatives.

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