Everything went as planned, in the indifference of the voters and to the benefit of the toughest. The partial results of the legislative poll on Friday February 21 revealed on Sunday a comfortable victory for the conservatives, who won a large majority of the 290 seats in the Iranian parliament. This success drives out the majority of moderates and reformers who supported the government of President Hassan Rohani, whose second term will end in 2021. It is inseparable from record abstention.
At 42.57%, the participation rate is the lowest recorded in the history of the Islamic Republic. Since the first legislative elections in 1980, the voter turnout has been on average a few points above 50%. The dropout is therefore clear, while calls to vote en masse had been repeated repeatedly by the caciques of the regime and first by the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, in the weeks preceding the election.
Rohani era fence
In addition to their candidates, hundreds of whom saw their candidacies invalidated by the Council of Revolutionary Guards, the reformers and moderates saw the disappearance of their potential electorate, manifestly gone from a desire to transform the regime from the inside out. a refusal to play the system game by going to the polls.
This change was particularly felt in Tehran. If, in the provinces, the election of a parliamentarian is often a matter of clientelism and very local interests, the legislative ballots, in the big cities and in the capital – which sends thirty representatives to the Parliament -, are more representative of the national political developments. Turnout was less than 25% on Friday, and voters who allowed reformers to secure all of Tehran’s seats in 2016 did not show up, allowing the Conservatives to achieve a complete victory in the capital. .
With Friday’s election, the Iranian regime organized the end of the Rohani era. The parliamentary majority that the moderate president’s camp had won in the previous elections in February 2016 had been popular encouragement for the policy of detente towards the United States. The electorate then expressed a will to believe in the promises of openness and economic progress associated with it. The Iran nuclear deal, signed in 2015, was slow to bear economic fruit, but had not yet been emptied of substance. Donald Trump was not in the White House. There was still reason for hope for Iranians eager for change.
