Iran compares Trump loss to its own 2009 election controversy
Voices have ranged from arguing that a victory by US President-elect Joe Biden actually doesn’t matter for Iran to comparisons of the 2020 election in the US to the flawed 2009 election in Iran.
By SETH J. FRANTZMANAttendees wave flags as Iranian Americans from across California converge in Los Angeles to participate in the California Convention for a Free Iran and to express support for nationwide protests in Iran from Los Angeles, California, U.S., January 11, 2020.(photo credit: REUTERS/ PATRICK T. FALLON)
Iran’s complex understanding of the US election has not involved the stereotypical cheering one might expect from the regime. Instead, voices have ranged from arguing that a victory by President-elect Joe Biden actually doesn’t matter for Iran, and that Tehran has defeated the US sanctions anyway without a change in Washington, to comparing it to the flawed 2009 Iranian election.A Fars News Agency article on Sunday morning compared the 2009 election controversy with the US election. Mir Hossein Mousavi, who lost the election but accused it of having vote-rigging, is similar to what US President Donald Trump is now doing, the report said. There are some obvious differences: Mousavi was a more left-leaning reformer whose followers rejected the far-right Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who had already been president since 2005. Mousavi was more like Joe Biden in this respect.According to Fars, a semi-official news agency of the Iranian regime, Mousavi refused to concede and accept the results. But the reality is more complex. His supporters in Iran’s Green Movement believed there was fraud and corruption involved in the election system. There were mass protests.The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps responded with a harsh crackdown. People were killed and beaten. Mousavi was placed under house arrest, eventually along with his wife, and he has been kept there ever since. Iran is not a real democratic regime; it hangs protesters. This is a major difference that Fars News Agency doesn’t see or admit.Nevertheless, Fars says Iran’s 2009 election is comparable to America in 2020 because one side did not concede and there were protests. It argues that Europe and social media have been hypocritical in this respect. The article suggests that while European governments and others critiqued Iran for cracking down on protests, they have instead embraced Biden in the US and not pro-Trump protesters.The Iranian regime argues that social media has worked to limit Trump tweets and to limit calls for protests in the US. The Fars article asks why social media giants seemed to do the opposite in Iran, enabling protests and opening up their platform for dissidents. In a sense, they suggest social media has shut down protests in America, limiting retweets and limiting critique of election “fraud” while it does the opposite with Iran.The irony here is a bit thick, since Iran’s regime media is basically claiming that social media needs to help it limit protests, arguing in some roundabout way that dissident protesters in Iran are similar to Trump supporters in the US – without the obvious acknowledgment that the two are from different ends of the political spectrum. Iran’s regime crushes liberal dissent, women’s rights and minorities and hangs poor, innocent protesters, such as the wrestler Navid Afkari. The US doesn’t hang protesters.Social media has intervened in the US election a bit, trying to stop what it calls “misinformation,” which also appears to mean that any critique of “fraud” is also censored, which would appear to be against freedom of expression.The main point Iran’s regime is making is that the West is hypocritical. However, the willingness of Fars News Agency to go deep into the 2009 controversial election represents an important step in Iran: the way its history is examined through a US lens by its own regime mouthpieces.At the heart of it is a suggestion that Iranians are similar to Americans, divided by two different regimes but basically similar people with similar problems at the ballot box. Perhaps all the burning of US flags and talk about defeating the US is just talk, and even the far-right Fars News Agency knows that average Iranians are similar to their American counterparts.
