Elections in Iran must change how its politics is perceived in the West

For nearly two decades now, two factors have been affecting political analyses in the West about Iranian politics; reformists and an imminent death of Khamenei. Looking through Western political lenses, political analysts have always been mesmerized by this myth that a conflict between so-called reformists and hardliners in Iran can affect the structural arrangements inside Iranian politics and these structural effects would lead the country to some types of responsible behavior inside and outside its borders. This formulation of Iranian politics stems from the fact that the democracy in the West is itself a result of conflict among elites of society where democratic rules of competition and reconciliation arise from arrangements the elites reach to settle their differences. 

Iranians, being aware of the way their politics is interpreted in the Western Hemisphere, have been trying to strengthen this myth. As one of the recent examples, Foreign Minister Javad Zarif discussed, in a leaked recording, the endeavors of reformists to make the country lean more toward the West and how hardliners are blocking these endeavors with the help of Russians. Although leaking such a tape is usually considered a serious crime in Iran, and despite the direct undermining of Qasem Soleimani’s image in this recording, nothing really happened to find or to punish those responsible for the leak. This leaves room open for speculation that the leak of this tape can be actually be another attempt by Iranians to invest in the reformist-hardliner myth to lure Americans into a miscalculation about the future path Iran can go if the nuclear deal is revived.

 However, one variable has never been present in the case of Iran: a favorable balance of power among elites. The presence of Khamenei, the leader of Iran, has always blurred the perspective of change in the near future and loomed over change through competition of political elites. Therefore, many had invested in the death of the dictator which can lead to disruption of the current balance in favor of a more equal one among the major factions within the regime.

However, the system confronted the world with a bitter reality by its handling of the upcoming presidential election from the outset of the processes. This reality is that the Iranian system is not a simple dictatorship in which the death of the leader can lead to a change in anything. The regime is carefully planning the transition to a new leader after the death of the current one and it is making this transitional period impervious to internal disputes, external pressure, and social forces. 

This regime has already experienced the death of its previous leader and was able to transition to the second phase with keeping the main course of its behavior inside and outside. For the whole regime, it really did not matter who would take the steering wheel as much as how to keep the course. This time as well, quite contrary to the speculation of some experts, the goal is not so much making Mojtaba Khamenei, the son of the current leader, the next leader as it is creating a safe transitional period in which the regime can maintain its main ideological orientation. 

THERE IS a near consensus agreement among Iran experts that the Iranian election has never been even close to free by the standards of the democratic world, and they usually are engineered and rigged. However, the way this election has been handled by the system can be characterized as the institutionalization of “electoral engineering.” When we talk about the system in Iran, we are talking about political institutions, political factions, and written/unwritten laws which govern the relationships between these institutions and factions and among themselves. The hardcore of power in Iran, which is located in the office of Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), has full control over hard and soft sources of power such as police and TV, full control over the Foreign and Intelligence ministries, and also fully controls the Guardian Council and judiciary.

This hardcore of power was able to utilize the Guardian Council to purge the candidates in an unprecedented manner, and with the teeth and claws of the IRGC, it was able to control the social reactions to it. The reformists, also as one element of the system, were not willing to show the slightest resistance. Except for some mutter from former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the main disqualified candidates from all factions accepted the decisions of the Guardian Council as, although unsavory, a legitimate process in the system and a part of the laws. The result is that the political institutions, the military component of the regime, and various factions, playing by a set of written and unwritten laws, have institutionalized the engineering of elections. Although the immediate purpose of these disqualifications is to make necessary arrangements for the transition period, their effects will remain as a long term guarantee for maintaining the ideological character of the regime.

For many years, Iran experts were worried about the Islamic Republic following the model of China in which a hybrid system can have a free market policy and can open up economic relations with the West while the human rights situation gets worse on a daily basis. Today they can rest assured that the system is not going to follow that model but the model of North Korea. 

The Iranian regime has shown that its capacity for reform is almost zero and there is no chance that the conflict among elites inside Iran can bring any meaningful change. The ideological objectives of the regime which are to export the Islamic Revolution, to lead the Islamic world in its confrontation with the West, and to destroy Israel as the stronghold of democracy in the heart of the region, are strongly entrenched in a set of institutions and power relations that cannot be altered through reform.

The only viable and reliable force that could bring a real change to Iran is the existing resistance among the national minorities including Kurds, the Baloch, and Arabs. These groups are in contradiction with the system in an inherent and quintessential way. They also have the strongest incentive to confront the system more than anyone else since it is their land that is at stake and then their group and individual liberties – a cause for which they usually pay the highest price.