Iran’s Parliamentary Elections: A Turning Point in Iranian Politics

2024-03-03 21:30:00

By overwhelmingly ignoring the polls this Friday, March 1, the Iranians inflicted a new snub on the authorities of the Islamic Republic. Barely 25 million Iranians turned out, out of 61 million voters in total, to renew the parliamentary assembly and an important council of clerics. This participation rate, which barely passes the 40% mark, is the lowest in the entire history of this regime founded in 1979. However, it sees it as a victory over the calls for boycott and protest votes which threatened the electoral legitimacy that this theocracy with a democratic facade needs. But with such logic, success is necessarily guaranteed… No, almost a year and a half following the long protest movement triggered by the death of the student Mahsa Amini and bloodily repressed, most Iranians have meant by their absence a denial, if not a rejection, of this regime which ignores and constrains them too much. The snub was coupled with a disavowal.

However, the Iranian authorities had tried to stimulate participation, in particular with a record number of 15,200 candidates (or 52 for each of the 290 seats in the Islamic Assembly). The ace ! Even by extending the vote by two hours at the last moment, the 2024 legislative elections put an end to the 2020 record (42.5%), already achieved following large popular movements demanding better living conditions and more freedoms. The tendency towards disavowal is confirmed and accentuated.

Iran, a threshold power.

But the ultraconservatives of President Ebrahim Raïssi now have the reins firmly in hand. After the – disappointed – hope of the Rouhani years aimed at economic improvement and the end of its status as a pariah state, the Islamic Republic is trying to break its international isolation by forging alliances with regional and global partners who accept it as it is. ‘she is. Or a technological nation on the threshold of the atomic bomb, which sells missiles to Russia for its war in Ukraine. An Islamist power that inspires forces and stirs up outbreaks in the Middle East. A repressive power, bearer of an alternative world order, from which the European Union – and the West in general – would be wise not to look away.

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#snub #coupled #disavowal