Accusations of fraud in Iran’s presidential election

What happened

Pro-Western reform candidates were trounced in Iran's presidential elections amid accusations that Islamic hard-liners had rigged the count. Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a conservative cleric, led the seven-way race with 21 percent of the vote. He will be in a runoff this week with the ultraconservative mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Ahmadinejad, given little chance of winning before the election, got a surprising 19.5 percent. 'œIt has been a completely unpredictable election,' said Deputy Interior Minister Mahmoud Mirlohi.

The two leading reform candidates'”Mehdi Karroubi and Mostafa Moin'”accused leaders of Iran's Revolutionary Guard and other hard-liners of interfering with the count, to thwart candidates supporting a more liberal, democratic Iran. Moin finished fifth, after pre-election polls consistently predicted he would qualify for the runoff, Iran's first since its 1979 Islamic revolution. The government closed two newspapers planning to publish complaints of fraud. Major reform groups urged supporters to rally behind Rafsanjani'”who has called for greater engagement with the U.S.'”to keep Iran from becoming a 'œfascist' or 'œTaliban' state. But many Iranians said they would boycott the election, which was scheduled to take place Friday, after The Week went to press. 'œWe have to choose between bad and worse,' one voter said.

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What the editorials said

What a 'œsham,' said The New York Times. There was never much chance Iran's elections would reflect the will of the people, 'œgiven that it was a council of unelected clerics deciding who would and who wouldn't be allowed to run.' But with the field narrowed to a 'œhard-liner' who fervently believes in his country's right to its nuclear program, and a former president whose government fomented 'œterrorism at home and abroad,' the chance of any positive change in Iran is truly 'œbleak.'

'œThe mullahs seem to have taken their usual election manipulations to another level,' said The Wall Street Journal. The world will now be tempted to cheer Rafsanjani as a 'œpragmatist' who will abandon Iran's nuclear dreams for 'œthe right 'economic incentives.'' But Rafsanjani is the 'œfather of Iran's nuclear program,' and he'll not abandon the regime's quest for the bomb.

What the columnists said

This election has been no model of democracy, said Amir Taheri in the New York Post, but it is far from irrelevant. It is, of course, a fact that Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Guide of the revolution, holds all real power and can tip the election any way he wants. But if Rafsanjani wins, it will show that the regime recognizes it 'œneeds a kind of interface' to work out its differences with its people and the world. An upset victory for Ahmadinejad would hand absolute control to 'œthe North Koreans of Islam,' who will stop at nothing to impose their 'œrecipe for the ideal society.'

The reformists shouldn't be completely discouraged, said Roya Hakakian in The Washington Post. Rafsanjani's popularity stemmed largely from his image as 'œthe can-do candidate' and 'œMr. Fixit.' This is a 'œradical departure' from the past, when a candidate had to be seen as an Islamic 'œvisionary' to have a chance to win. Clearly, Iran is 'œstruggling to shed the fundamentalism of the last quarter-century.'

It's the hard-liners who should really be worried, said John Hughes in The Christian Science Monitor. Faced with 'œa tsunami of discontent' among young Iranians, many of whom are unemployed, even conservative candidates had to give lip service to reformist demands for greater democracy, a free economy, and increased participation for women and young people. 'œThis is dangerous stuff for an Iranian regime that seeks to turn back the clock, or at least cause time to stand still, in an Islamic world caught up in debate about freedom and modernization.'

What next?

The American Spectator