Iran at the crossroads: have the mullahs lost their grip?

Nobody was holding their breath over the outcome of this month's elections to the Majlis – Iran's parliament, said Maryam Aslany and Rana Dasgupta in The Sunday Times. These were the first elections to be held after the wave of protests that convulsed the nation in 2022-23. That unrest, sparked by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old student arrested for not wearing a hijab properly, had threatened the authority of Iran's supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, which is why he was so determined to frame last week's election as a public endorsement of the Islamic regime. To that end, every candidate was vetted by the Guardian Council, an assembly of 12 clerics controlled by Khamenei, which made it its business to disqualify almost all reformists and moderate conservatives from standing. Thus the result was always a foregone conclusion.

Yet even in this pitiful excuse for an election, Iranians managed to deliver a "stinging rebuke" to the regime, said Farnaz Fassihi in The New York Times. Deprived of their preferred candidates, many didn't bother to vote: turnout was just 41% – the lowest in the Islamic Republic's 45-year history. In Tehran, it was 24%. Khamenei tried to spin the outcome as an "epic" victory; it was anything but. Some 15,000 candidates ended up competing for 290 seats, said Sina Toossi in Foreign Policy (Washington), and the winners were mainly members of a new generation of fundamentalists, many clerics, who espouse a rigid version of Islamic law and oppose any engagement with the West. Having bested their pragmatic rivals, they now seem intent on out-hawking each other on both domestic and foreign issues.

But far more important than the outcome of elections to the Majlis has been that of elections to the powerful Assembly of Experts, held on the same day, said Guido Steinberg in Cicero (Berlin). This is the body responsible for choosing Khamenei's successor: and as the supreme leader is frail and about to turn 85, it's more than likely the assembly will have to carry out that duty sooner rather than later. So once again, as with the Majlis, every effort was made to ensure the ascendancy of candidates supportive of Khamenei and to bar reformists from running: even former president Hassan Rouhani was excluded from running on the grounds he was too moderate. So skewed to the conservative Right is the assembly that a hardliner is certain to prevail in the race to succeed Khamenei. Yet by excluding conservative moderates, Khamenei may have ended up weakening his position, said Iran International (London). Radicals are far less easy to keep under control. Take a man like Hamid Rasaei, a hardliner "with a questionable reputation", who wasn't even allowed to run in the 2020 election, but who last week was elected to a Tehran seat by a huge majority. Rasaei has already disregarded Khamenei's plea for the new intake "to avoid conflicts and controversies". Quite the contrary, he has branded the speaker of the Majlis, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, "a hypocrite" and demanded his resignation. And Ghalibaf happens to be a relative of Khamenei's.

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As one of its former commanders, Ghalibaf has the backing of the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps), an important player in Iranian politics, so he is probably secure for now. But whichever faction prevails, the real question to ponder is how long the mullahs can retain their grip over such a disaffected populace, said The Economist. Inflation is soaring; meat and even rice are unaffordable to most people; the regime's backing of Hezbollah in Lebanon and of Yemen's Houthis is proving hugely costly; US sanctions continue to bite. And "everyone in Iran knows what the regime is truly afraid of", said Maryam Aslany and Rana Dasgupta. It's written in the graffiti sprayed on walls and bridges across the country. "Long live the king." What most Iranians long for is the return of a constitutional monarchy, and of a man now living in Great Falls, Virginia – the son of the shah and scion of the dynasty that ruled before the mullahs seized power in 1979: crown prince Reza Pahlavi.