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In the recent legislative elections, the regime in Tehran scored a victory and suffered a defeat at the same time. The winners were exactly who the ayatollahs wanted to be, but the turnout was the lowest in the history of the Islamic republic. The victory shows that the regime's ultraconservatives are firmly in control of Iran, but the low turnout indicates a loss of popular support for a regime that has been increasingly challenged in recent years.
The regime won the elections but lost the voters. A symbolic victory of the opposition
Iranians were called to elect their new Parliament, as well as the new members of the Assembly of Experts. The latter has the role of advising the supreme leader and choosing a successor when he dies. The current leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is already 84 years old, and for years there have been reports on his health issues, including a successfully treated prostate cancer in 2014 and an emergency surgery in 2022.
All candidates in Iran's elections must be approved by the so-called Guardian Council, a 12-person body that is effectively controlled by the supreme leader. The council makes sure only supporters of the Islamic republic run in the elections, which are divided into two large groups (none of them homogeneous): moderates and conservatives. When the moderates have a larger share in parliament or are allowed to have a presidential candidate, the situation may loosen up inside Iran, but also in its foreign relations. In the latest elections, however, the Guardian Council was stricter than in the past and clearly favored the (ultra)conservatives, for them to have clear majorities both in parliament and in the Assembly of Experts; the country's president, Ebrahim Raisi, is also a conservative.
With the result virtually assured, the high stakes of the election for the regime in Tehran was to have as high a turnout as possible. This would have shown that the ayatollahs still enjoy the broad support of the population, that the regime has legitimacy. Khamenei himself told Iranians that voting was a religious duty — a claim that, especially in a theocracy, should carry some weight. However, the authorities did not resort to such messages alone. The Iranian press in exile writes that opponents calling for boycott were arrested, soldiers were promised permits if they voted, an attempt was made to mobilize the millions of students eligible to vote, and even the statistics were manipulated by "reducing" the number of those with the right to vote, so that the percentage of people actually voting would get higher.
None of this worked. A telephone poll taken before the election showed that only a third of the eligible Iranians would turn out to vote. State media in Tehran said after the vote that the turnout was 40-41%. It is the lowest voter turnout since the Islamic revolution of 1979, lower than the 42.5% registered 4 years ago and significantly lower than in 2016, when the turnover stood at 62%. Iranians are unhappy with what is happening in their country and have shown it by refusing to participate in the elections arranged by the regime.
Low voter turnout signifies more than the authorities’ failure to mobilize voters; it can also be interpreted as a victory for those who oppose the regime (or at least the conservatives who dominate it). Before the elections, the winner of the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize, Narges Mohammadi, launched from prison a call to boycott the elections and around 300 personalities signed a public letter denouncing the elections as a farce.
“Unprecedented” protests against the Iranian regime, on the rise
Iranians' grievances stem primarily from economic issues, which have turned chronic as a result of the sanctions imposed on Iran for its nuclear program, but there is also a significant layer of the population that wants political reforms and even a regime change, as seen in several waves of nationwide protests, the most recent of which took place in 2022-2023, following the death of young Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested and beaten for not “properly” wearing her hijab - the Islamic veil - which is mandatory under the Iranian law derived from the Islamic one, Sharia. The young woman's death infuriated primarily the women, who were at the forefront of the protests; many tore off their veils in defiance of the regime , and such gestures have been recorded to this day. The demonstrations were not only about women's rights, though; some protesters challenged the regime as a whole, and international media reported that "death to the dictator" or "death to Khamenei" were also chanted on the streets of Iranian cities. There was also violence, resulting in hundreds of deaths, and the regime moved to a harsh campaign of repression, arresting many protesters and sentencing some of them to death; one of the most recent execution, that of a 23-year-old man, was reported in January.
The protests of 2022-2023 were described as the largest in the history of the Islamic Republic and the most serious challenge to the theocratic regime. But Iran seems to become the place for an increasing number of records in the field. The first massive wave of demonstrations - the so-called "Green Movement" - was recorded in 2009, when hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets in the country's major cities, convinced that the elections had been rigged in favor of conservative President Mahmud Ahmadinejad, who had just won a second term in office. It was 30 years since the Islamic revolution of 1979.
Ten years after the Green Movement, more protests were reported in Iran, termed as the most serious challenge to the regime. The trigger this time was economic: a sharp rise in fuel prices in the fall of 2019. The situation was already tense due to chronic economic issues that had led to a series of strikes and demonstrations the previous year. However, the protests launched in November 2019 were much larger and much more violent – more than one thousand people were reportedly killed. From economic demands, the demonstrators quickly moved to protests against the political regime, and, as it would happen in the case of the protests triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini, anti-regime chants were heard.
It was less than three years from the "Bloody November" - as the 2019 movement was called - to the next massive wave of protests. It’s very likely that, after the protest by absenteeism on March 1, leaders in Tehran are now wondering when Iranians will take to the streets again.
Between the Iranian Crescent and 'neither Gaza, nor Lebanon': Iran has become a regional power, but many Iranians object to its foreign policy
Elections took place against the background of a complicated “rope dancing” performed by Iran at regional level. Its proxies and allies across the Middle East have launched, in the name of solidarity with Gaza, hundreds of attacks – Hezbollah on the Israeli-Lebanese border, other Shia militias, especially Iraqi ones, against US bases in Iraq, Syria and Jordan, Houthi rebels in Yemen against ships transiting the Gulf of Aden and the Red Sea.
All this militia agitation is useful to Tehran to a point, because it messes things up for its main adversaries, the Israeli and the Americans, and also shows that Iran supports the Palestinians. Let's not forget that Iran has ties to Hamas and that its proxy in Gaza, the Islamic Jihad, participated alongside Hamas in the October 7 terrorist attack. The attacks against the Americans, who responded with strikes in Syria, Iraq and Yemen, also suit Russia, an important ally of Tehran, as they are distracting Washington from the war in Ukraine.
However, Tehran does not seem to want a direct confrontation with Israel or the United States, so it has to be careful how far the militias go. It is telling that after the attack on the Tower 22 base in Jordan, the first since the start of the Gaza war in which American soldiers died, the militia suspected of organizing it, Khataib Hezbollah, rushed into announcing that it was suspending military operations. Similarly, on the Lebanese-Israeli border, Hezbollah avoided provoking Israel too strongly with a large-scale attack that would lead to a matching response. In Yemen the situation is even more complicated – the Houthis are Iran's allies rather than its proxies, so Tehran's control over them is not as strong as it is over Hezbollah or the Iraqi Shiite militias. The problem is that the maritime route through the Red Sea is extremely important for China and its trade with the European Union. Iran is largely dependent on Beijing, which buys its oil, which, due to US sanctions, it has nowhere else to sell. China, on the other hand, does not depend on Iranian oil, so if it gets too annoyed, it can decide to give it up – and oil is only part of the bilateral trade exchanges, which all benefit China.
Tehran is not just playing with fire through the Shiite militias. In the poker game that the Iranian nuclear file has become, the stakes continue to rise: As Iran gets closer to being able to produce a bomb, so does the risk that its adversaries will resort to a military solution to prevent it. Since Donald Trump withdrew the United States from the nuclear deal in 2018, Iran has gradually increased the level of uranium enrichment, which at the end of last year had reached 60%, from where it can get relatively easy to 90% enriched uranium, the one used to build nuclear weapons.
Regionally, Iran has never been more powerful than it is today. From the isolation of the 1980s, when it was at war with Iraq, or the American "encirclement" of 2003, when Washington's forces were controlling Afghanistan and Iraq, Iran has become one of the great powers of the East, with a sphere of influence that includes Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Iranian missiles are capable of hitting targets across the region, including the Gulf oil fields, and the moment when Tehran will be able to produce a nuclear bomb is getting closer.
This policy—besides the fact that it may push Iran's foreign adversaries into taking certain measures—is not that popular domestically. Since 2009, anti-government protesters have regularly chanted "neither Gaza, nor Lebanon. My life for Iran". Iranians, many of whom are nationalists, do not agree though with the state spending money to support the empire when there are so many economic problems at home.
The ayatollahs seem to have less and less in common with their own population – even if, for now, their grip on Iran appears to be strengthening.
