World Politics Review
written by Catherine Cheney
Thursday March 8, 2012
The recent parliamentary elections in Iran, in which conservative allies of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei appeared to gain majority control of the parliament, were an embarrassing blow to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who will now face an even more hostile political environment for the rest of his second term, which ends in June 2013.
“Going forward, we are going to see a more authoritarian system of government where there is less give-and-take and where foreign and domestic policy is more likely to be rigid rather than flexible, with really a few men making major decisions,” said Alireza Nader, a senior international policy analyst at RAND. “Iran is going to become less democratic. We’re witnessing the destruction of the Islamic Republic as it was envisioned by its founders.”
According to Nader, the election was not fair and free. “It was hardly an election,” he said. The Guardian Council, a conservative, 12-member oversight panel that supervises elections, disqualified many candidates from among Ahmadinejad’s supporters, Nader said, while many of the reformists boycotted the election.
“Many reformists have been jailed, tortured and harassed,” he said, referring to the aftermath of the disputed 2009 presidential election, in which Ahmadinejad was re-elected amid charges of widespread voting fraud. “So they did not want to legitimize this parliamentary election given the conditions within Iran.”
One exception is former reformist president Mohammad Khatami, who broke ranks by voting in the parliamentary election. “He’s received some criticism,” Nader said. “He had a rather vague explanation for the reason he did it, something about protecting the reformist agenda. But given the fact that the reformists are shut out of the political system, how will they reform the system?”
The election results were not a surprise, Nader said, because Ahmadinejad, who is seen as a threat to the ideological core of the state, has fallen out of favor with Khamenei, who determined the winners and losers. Since endorsing the results of the 2009 presidential election, Khamenei has turned against the president, expressing concerns over the way Ahmadinejad has distanced himself from “velayat-e-faqih,” or the guardianship of the jurist, which gives the supreme leader his legitimacy and serves as the foundation for theocracy in the country. Khamenei has now declared that there must be “unity of direction” rather than “dual authority.”
“Khamenei is trying to control power as Iran’s dictator,” Nader said. “He is behaving a lot like the shah before him, who created these parties on paper and made it look like there was more to decision-making than the authority of the shah. But in Iran, we have had different power centers become diminished over the years, so in reality, the major decision-makers are Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard.”
The election results will not have a major impact on Iranian foreign policy, Nader said, because Khamenei already makes the major foreign policy decisions. But as the Revolutionary Guard, which drives the country’s nuclear program, gains more power, Nader said, the U.S. “will face an even less-flexible foe.”
“The fact that Ahmadinejad won’t be present after 2013 could maybe soften the regime’s image internationally somewhat, because Ahmadinejad tends to be more provocative,” Nader said. “We could see a more ‘moderate’ president, if there’s even a presidency, because there’s a possibility it could be eliminated.”
While the process of eliminating the presidency would be difficult given the need to revise the constitution and the opposition such a move would certainly provoke, ultimately, Nader said, Khamenei will weigh the costs and benefits and make the decision on his own.
In terms of how Ahmadinejad might fight back, Nader said the president has threatened to reveal “the government’s dirty secrets.” If the attacks on him increase, so too could his threats.
“It’s not the end of Ahmadinejad, but [after these elections], he’s a much weaker political figure in Iran,” Nader said. “Khamenei’s preference is for him to basically fade away.”
No comments:
Post a Comment