Crackdown in Iran: the purge of the moderates
Iran’s clerical elite has gone to great lengths to fix this week’s election, said
Al-Monitor (Washington). In Friday’s parliamentary poll, voters will have found their choices even more narrowed than usual. The hard-line Guardian Council, whose members are appointed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, always vets election candidates. But this time it eliminated 9,000 of the 16,000 people who applied to stand – the most draconian purge since the 1979 revolution. Moderate and reformist politicians say they’re only able to stand in 60 of the parliament’s 290 seats. “Khamenei is close to consolidating power in parliament and the government,” said Middle East Eye (London). At the same time, the security forces are cracking down on critics and raiding journalists’ homes. The reformist president, Hassan Rouhani, slammed the purge in “unprecedentedly strong terms”, describing the race as “engineered”. But though he called on his supporters to turn out in large numbers, many moderates planned simply to boycott the ballot altogether.
The Islamic Republic has endured much since 1979, said Gerrit Wustmann on Telepolis (Hanover), “but the situation has never been as fragile as it is now”. Hundreds were killed and thousands arrested in protests over petrol price rises in November. Then the country’s top general, Qassem Soleimani, was killed in a US drone strike on 3 January. The assassination initially brought thousands of supporters to the streets, but the mood turned sour a few days later, when it emerged that Iranian forces had shot down a Ukrainian passenger jet, killing 176 people, and tried to cover it up. Iran’s new generation – two-thirds of the population is under 30 – view this week’s elections as a sham. Their anger could be about to boil over.
When Rouhani won his second term in 2017, there was a real “sense of optimism” that Iran would prosper, said Ellie Geranmayeh in World Politics Review (New York). But sanctions imposed by the Trump administration have been “devastating”: the economy contracted by 8.7% last year. Liberal Iranians feel “exhausted, frustrated and increasingly hopeless” because the reformists have achieved so little, while this week, conservatives – of whom there are many – are likely to turn out in force, galvanised by Soleimani’s assassination. Trump aimed to change Iran’s behaviour, but his campaign “has only placed the two sides closer than ever to direct conflict, while allowing Iran’s hardliners to tighten their grip on power”.