Is today’s Iranian presidential election “a festival of freedom or a cover for theocracy?’ asks Elliott Abrams, George W. Bush’s deputy national security adviser and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week’s elections in Lebanon and Iran can be seen as twin tests of efforts to spread democracy to the Muslim world, but they differ in significant respects, he argues:
Elections matter, but how much they matter depends entirely on how free, open and fair they are. The Lebanese had a chance to vote against Hezbollah, and took the opportunity. Iranians, unfortunately, are being given no similar chance to decide who they really want to govern them.
“Media accounts that focus on the colorful rallies, the candidates’ personality, and the speeches …[fail] to reckon seriously with just how restricted, controlled, and opaque the entire process really is, according to the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation, a grantee of the National Endowment for Democracy. It highlights the “structural and legal flaws that critically mar Iran’s electoral process” in Neither Free nor Fair, Elections in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The election campaign has generated interest and passion, they concede, becoming a “battlefield where civil society finds space to articulate its demands for a more open and just society” and the resulting public debate helps expand the reach of civil society. Nevertheless, they warn, “laws that blatantly infringe on the Iranian people’s ability to determine their own political destiny will continue to make meaningful democratic change improbable.”
Some analysts fear that Ahmadinejad’s defeat “could result in paralysis or turmoil as hardliners and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps – which has publicly warned against a “velvet revolution” — clash with the newly-elected government.”
But Roxana Saberi, recently released from Tehran’s notorious Evin prison, argues that “Iran’s hard-liners will lose their main pretext for their tight grip on power and society” if a reformist victory leads to better U.S.-Iranian relations. She suggest that talk of “regime change” plays into the hands of the Islamic Republic’s and disadvantages those “women, student and labor activists, researchers, and academics who have been detained solely because they peacefully pursued freedom of expression, freedom of association or religious beliefs.
Whatever the result, the election indicates that Iran’s democracy has “proved more resilient and responsive than the manipulative and conservative Guardian Council anticipated.”
The election has revealed “the great chasms in Iranian society – traditionalists against modernists, rural against urban, devout against secular,” notes one observer. “After the insurrection of the past two weeks, after such extraordinary manifestations of popular discontent, it is hard to see how the fractured regime can put the genie back in the bottle.”
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