BICOM

Key Points

• The Iranian elections have presented a conundrum. Most perplexing is why Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, first allowed a vibrant election campaign to take place within his own tightly controlled parameters, but then apparently manipulated the results and clamped down harshly in the aftermath.
• On the surface, Ahmadinejad’s return to power may be seen as a setback for Western interests and their Arab allies, but it is important to note that Iran’s nuclear programme and key foreign policy decisions are ultimately matters to be determined by the ruling clerics headed by Khamenei.
• The Lebanese elections presented a more substantial choice, despite external meddling on both sides, between two blocs which reflect the principal fault line in Middle East today: a pro-Western coalition and an opposition whose members are backed by Syria and Iran. The results marked a significant victory for the former, but Lebanese politics remains severely hampered by Hezbollah’s ongoing independent paramilitary force.  The ongoing political instability will be watched with concern in Israel.

Introduction

The Iranian presidential and Lebanese parliamentary elections last week were billed as key indicators of the kind of Middle East the international community would be dealing with as President Barack Obama seeks to improve ties between America and the Muslim world. Whilst the political ramifications of both sets of elections are still being played out, this piece offers a preliminary analysis of the elections and their implications.

The Iranian presidential elections: an initial assessment

A great sense of anticipation had built up in advance of the Iranian election, with unprecedented energy and public participation in the campaigns. On Saturday 13 June, the Iranian interior ministry announced Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election for a second term with 62.6 percent of the vote, with his top rival, Mir Hussein Mousavi, taking just under 34 percent.  The announcement of Ahmadinejad’s victory sparked intense protests on a scale unseen on Tehran’s streets for at least ten years, amid allegations of widespread election irregularities.  Iran analyst Mehdi Khalaji observes that, whilst the extent of vote-rigging is unknown, the regime has a number of mechanisms for easily manipulating the results.[i]  Furthermore, the official turnout was a record 85 percent, compared to 63 percent in the first round in 2005. The leap in turnout seems remarkable in itself, but is particularly hard to square with a result in which the incumbent was returned by a landslide.

It is unclear why Ayatollah Khamenei may have allowed the campaign to play out in such an open manner only to gerrymander the result and clamp down so hard on the protests afterwards. This election was driven by a fierce campaign battle between the incumbent hardliner, Ahmadinejad, and Mousavi, a reformist who served as prime minister during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war. It was no secret that Khamenei favoured the hardliner but Ahmadinejad and Mousavi, as well as the two fringe candidates who were also permitted to run, are all prominent members of the Iranian political establishment.[ii]  Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has ultimate authority in the Islamic Republic, and would not consent to a candidate that opposed the theocratic regime. Khamenei and the clerical elite recognise Iranian society’s demand for a say in the country’s political future. By ostensibly offering political choice, the regime gives Iranians the sense of political participation and also helps to obscure the reality of repressive and authoritarian rule, both domestically and internationally.

Within this restricted, quasi-democratic framework, Ahmadinejad, a blacksmith’s son and former Revolutionary Guard, championed the poor and rural communities who have in the past felt neglected.[iii]  They enabled him to defeat former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in 2005. But Ahmadinejad’s overwhelming landslide this time round is hard to swallow given the widely reported disenchantment in Iranian society with his economic mismanagement and his peculiar and provocative conduct on the world stage.[iv]  His rival, Mousavi, clearly captivated large numbers of Iran’s urban youth and middle classes, drawn to his preference for greater social freedoms, women’s rights, and improved ties with the West in response to Barack Obama’s offer of dialogue.[v]

Following the declaration of the results, anger immediately spilled onto the street. The state has acted rapidly to crush the chances of any momentum building in civil society. Over the weekend, police arrested scores of reformist leaders and clashed with demonstrators. Mobile communications and popular social networking websites being used to rally Mousavi supporters were blocked, as they were at times during the campaign, and foreign journalists were obstructed from filming and filing their reports. But no smokescreen will fully conceal the widespread post-election frustration in Iran. Reformists called the outcome a “charade.” Despite the Supreme Leader’s having moved quickly to use his authority to dismiss any dissent by approving the results, Mousavi has officially called for the result to be annulled. The force of public opinion has forced Khamenei to accept an investigation of vote-rigging and fraud. David Miliband expressed his concern on Monday at “what seems to be [Iranian] state violence against its own people in Tehran and elsewhere.”

Ahmadinejad’s re-election and Iran’s nuclear ambitions

Many have assumed that a win for Mousavi might have helped with present US efforts to engage with Iran and lower US-Iranian tensions.[vi]  One of Mousavi’s key campaign criticisms of Ahmadinejad was the “exhibitionism, extremism and superficiality” of his foreign policy; a point which struck a chord with many ordinary Iranians. But whilst there would likely have been a change of tone had Mousavi taken office, there is no reason to think that Iran would have altered its rapidly maturing nuclear programme, which lies in the hands of the Supreme Leader, not the President. An Iranian presidential adviser, Mehdi Kalhor, told Reuters during the campaign, “[n]o one but the leader [Khamenei] can decide about any move to renew ties with America and Iran’s nuclear work.  Such issues cannot be traded by any president.”[vii]  In any case, the nuclear issue is one of national pride in the country, and it was largely absent from the campaign. Notably, Iran pursued its nuclear activity during the 1997-2005 tenure of Ahmadinejad’s predecessor, Mohammad Khatami, who was a reformist. Though there was a temporary suspension of uranium enrichment in 2003, the decider on this issue was the Supreme Leader.

Indeed, given the urgency with which the Iranian nuclear issue now needs to be addressed, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and others in the international community have considered that a new figurehead in Iran might have caused an unwelcome distraction.  Time would have been wasted re-evaluating a new president’s lip-service, whilst hardliners would continue to pursue nuclear weapons.  Patrick Clawson, of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, argues that for Khamenei, the difference between a reformist and a hardliner is “to blow smoke in our eyes instead of spitting in them.”[viii]  Even former Mossad chief Efraim Halevy and senior members of the Israeli defence establishment felt that an Ahmadinejad victory might help to maintain the focus on the critical issue of Iran’s uranium enrichment.[ix]

Whoever the President is, Iranian regime strategists will be looking to see how they can continue to buy time for their nuclear programme in the way they have invariably sought to do until now.  President Obama has already defined the period between the election and the end of the year as the time to press his policy of engagement and measure its progress. Eyes should now be on the next US move, and whether it will be complicated by the ongoing civil unrest around this election.

Iran and the Lebanese arena: back to old power politics

Just as Iran can be expected to continue its nuclear quest, it will also seek to strengthen its radical ambitions in a growing sphere of influence: Afghanistan to its east, Iraq in the west, close ties with Syria and support for key non-state clients operating in Arab circles in the Middle East and North Africa.  Among others, they include Hamas in the Palestinian Territories and, above all, Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Israel and the Arab world paid close attention to the 7 June Lebanese parliamentary elections.  Above all, they were keen to see how much power Hezbollah would yield at the polls, because a victory for the radical Shi’ite group would have been celebrated across the Iranian-led regional bloc.  As Ahmadinejad put it before the Lebanese voted, Hezbollah would have been able to “open new fronts that strengthen the resistance.”

In the event, the pro-Western ‘March 14’ coalition retained its majority against the Hezbollah-led ‘March 8’ opposition in an almost unchanged legislature.[x]  The political status quo was preserved largely due to the failure of former general Michel Aoun’s Free Democratic Party to carry significant numbers of Christian votes over to the opposition.[xi]  Fears about the country drifting further towards the Iranian and Syrian regional bloc were a key concern for many Lebanese, who do not want to see Lebanon dragged into another conflict with Israel.[xii] Hezbollah paid a price for going to war with Israel in 2006 and using violence on the Lebanese street in May 2008, when it put its organisational goals ahead of those of the Lebanese people.  It is a widely held belief that Hezbollah, whilst sufficiently deterred from acting bellicosely towards Israel for now, would go to war with Israel if Iran’s nuclear sites were targeted.

But the election defeat also has an upside for Nasrallah. It enables him to continue to have a hand on power without assuming the responsibilities of formal office. The US, Saudi Arabia and other key financial backers to the Lebanese government indicated that they would have reassessed their aid to Lebanon had the Iranian and Syrian backed factions won.

There is an important distinction to be made between the balance of power in the parliament and the underlying distribution of power in Lebanon.  The disparate nature of Lebanese society and the history of civil war means there is very high motivation to find consensus through power-sharing.  Hezbollah exploits this through its own independent military infrastructure. It has no qualms about unleashing these forces if threatened, as it demonstrated when it took control of parts of Beirut last May. That violent flare-up, and the protracted political paralysis which preceded it, was only put to rest once Hezbollah had secured a veto on policies of which it disapproved, in the Doha Accord.

Though disarming Hezbollah’s was a key issue in the election, the radical Shia group has made clear that is has no intention of allowing its independent military forces to be compromised.  Sa’ad Hariri, son of assassinated former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri and leader of the March 14 coalition, is open to Hezbollah’s inclusion in the new government, but he wants it to be stripped of its blocking third in the Lebanese cabinet. Hezbollah is unwilling to relinquish it without “guarantees” for its military autonomy. The ongoing inquiry into Rafiq Hariri’s assassination also remains a major concern for them. Protracted negotiations are now expected over the composition of the new government, and whilst violence has so far been avoided, the prospect of a new political crisis in Lebanon is never far away. Israel is watching carefully, with some concerns that Hezbollah could try to bolster its position and reaffirm the legitimacy of its armed forces by ratcheting up tensions with Israel.

Conclusion

The elections in both Iran and Lebanon, in very different ways, have shown the severe limitations of the democratic processes in both cases. Whilst Iran tries to give the impression of a democratic election, the shallowness of that facade has been laid bare by the events of the last few days. When the authority of the regime appears to be challenged on the street, it has shown its readiness to resort to force to defend itself. In Lebanon, the election gave the public a real choice between two very different alternatives. But despite Hezbollah’s defeat at the polls they will rely on military threat to resist attempts to interfere with their interests. As such, the agenda of the Iranian led axis to project its influence across the region and undermine Israel’s stability and other Western interests, appears to remain uninhibited.

 

 

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[i] A chief concern is the ability of the Guardian Council, whose duty it is to supervise the electoral process at each polling station, to alter vote totals before announcing them, owing to an absence of transparency in the vote counting process. Iran also prohibits international monitors.

[ii] The other two candidates, conservative former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezaei and former parliament speaker Mahdi Karroubi, were considered significant only to the extent that they might siphon off elements of the two main rivals’ support.  The candidates have been carefully screened to exclude anyone opposed to the ruling clerical establishment; each is part of the Islamic Revolution’s old guard.

[iii] Parisa Hafezi, ‘Ahmadinejad enjoys second surprise triumph’, Reuters,  13 June 2009.

[iv] Discussing Ahmadinjad’s recent speech at the anti-racism conference in Geneva, Mousavi said that the president had “disgraced” Iran, making Iranian passports comparable “to those of a country like Somalia.”

Mousavi: Ahmadinejad disgraced Iranians, PressTV, 24 May 2009.

[v] Associated Press, Iran vote extended by three hours with huge turnout The Independent, 12 June 2009.

[vi] Kenneth Katzman and Casey L. Addis, Middle East Elections 2009: Lebanon, Iran, Afghanistan, and Iraq,

CRS Report for Congress, CRS, 18 May 2009.

[vii] ‘Khamenei sets key Iran policy’, Reuters, 1 June 2009; Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, op. cit.

[vii] Zvi Bar’el, ‘Iranian elections / Not the content, just the tone’, Haaretz, 12 June 2009.

[viii] ‘Clawson: Khamenei “Worried” About Future of His Regime’, The Atlantic

[ix] Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, ‘Ahmadinejad win actually preferable for Israel’, Haaretz, 14 June 2009.

[x] March 14 won 68 of the 128 seats, but with the support of 3 independents, it has a total of 71, against 57 for the opposition.  The previous parliament was characterised by a 70:58 split.

[xi] Notwithstanding the intricacies of Lebanon’s confessional electoral system, the Christian vote was considered key to the outcome.  This was essentially because, as expected, the Shiite community remained loyal to opposition factions, whilst the Sunni and Druse sectors overwhelmingly backed the governing coalition.

[xii] See, for instance, Jonathan Spyer, Analysis: Lebanon election results offer some relief, but no major changes, Jerusalem Post, 8 June 2009.