Election boycott

last updated 8 January 2015

Tehran

Only around 20 percent of Iranian voters showed up at the polls last week, in desultory elections for city councils across the country. The turnout was a blow to the hard-line mullahs, who had urged the people to turn out in great numbers. But it also reflected widespread disillusionment with the reform movement, which swept elections a few years ago but has produced very little actual reform. Reformers, who lost hundreds of city council seats, told the daily Hambastegi that they blamed the defeat on their failure to build effective coalitions. They ran far too many candidates. For 15 council seats in Tehran, for example, there were more than 1,100 people competing.