Finding some hope in Iran

Editorial

Canada’s Foreign Minister John Baird dismissed the election of Iran’s new president, the so-called “moderate” Hassan Rohani, as “effectively meaningless.”

“Of the 686 candidates who tried to register as presidential candidates, only eight were permitted to run,” Baird said in a statement. “With Iran’s opposition leaders in jail and their supporters having been denied the ability to coordinate since June 2009, none of the eight regime-approved candidates represents a real alternative for Iranian voters.”

Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Israel would not be deluded by the election of the candidate perceived as the most liberal from among the group of eight OK’d by the theocratic regime’s dictators, and ultimately approved by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “The international community must not be caught up in wishful thinking and be tempted to relax the pressure on Iran to halt its nuclear program,” Netanyahu told media.

Other countries were also circumspect, offering diplomatic expressions of hopefulness, with little substantive to say about the real impact of the change in the presidency.

Pessimism is understandable. The regime nixed 678 potential presidents and found just eight acceptable. Of these, seven were deemed “hardline” and one was, rightly or wrongly, perceived as “moderate.” The “moderate” won by a landslide.

The results may be meaningless in the grander scheme of Iranian politics. While outgoing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was the global face of Iran and the provocateur who played cat and mouse with international nuclear inspectors, among others, the nuclear program was not his alone. It is authorized and advanced by the real powers in the country, so no great advancement on that front seems likely as a result of the vote.

Yet the people of Iran have spoken. They were not as free to speak as they would have been had there been a genuine election where any legitimately eligible candidate was free to run but, faced as they were with eight dubious choices, they made a clear statement.

The elections proceeded without the violence and near-revolution that accompanied the 2009 election and its results. Perhaps the regime’s efforts to avoid upheaval by allowing the election of a perceived moderate was a strategy designed to assuage disgruntled citizens and present a less hostile face to the world. If Rohani is a genuinely less hardline man with a mind of his own, perhaps the regime believed they could buy some time with their citizens and the world by allowing him to win, while keeping him on a short leash.

This sort of carrot and stick routine is a dangerous game for dictators. Maintaining power without popular consent is always a tenuous balance between exerting enough force to prevent an uprising with enough laxity to lessen the public’s need to revolt. The regime tightened the reins after the 2009 elections. The 2013 elections may represent a loosening. But in various cases in the long, sad history of autocrats, the unraveling of a dictatorship can often be traced back to either a loosening of the yoke or a crackdown. Whenever the status quo is upset, the potential for a massive swing of pendulum becomes riskier.

Baird, Netanyahu and all the others who have warned that we should not let our guard down are correct. Yet, if there is a glimmer of hope, it is that the Iranian people have sent the clearest message they could to their oppressors and to the world. They voted overwhelmingly for the candidate they perceived could deliver reform, and now they have expectations. If those expectations are not met, the carefully controlled equilibrium upon which every tyranny balances will be threatened.

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