Demonstration elections

Tyrants never learn: one could not call for elections and not honor its results.

Elections that are held for show and not for substance have always backfired. Such elections are called — in the technical language of political scientists — demonstration elections.

The problem with demonstration elections is that the voters tend to take them seriously. Despite the odds, voters take to them with a surprising amount of democratic faith. They hang on desperately to the possibility that their votes might actually manage to change a distasteful status quo.

In 1985, Ferdinand E. Marcos called for “snap elections”. He intended that exercise to be merely window dressing for his aging dictatorship, a means to win international approval for his rule. He did not expect that the voters who wanted change desperately would seize on that empty exercise and infuse it with grand hopes for change. When the results of the February 7, 1986 elections were blatantly stolen, a popular insurrection happened.

Two decades ago, facing international isolation, the military dictatorship in Burma decided to hold its own demonstration elections. In the astounding results that the regime could not conceal, the democratic forces led by Aung San Suu Kyi won overwhelmingly.

In crude haste, the military dictatorship decided to annul the results of the voting and put Suu Kyi under detention. For the entire period since then, Suu Kyi lived under house arrest, a poignant and moving testament to the illegitimacy of the brutal regime that persecutes her incessantly. The world responded by awarding Suu Kyi the Nobel Prize and Burma’s isolation deepened even more.

The error of the Ahmadinejad regime in Tehran was to imagine they could easily pull off a demonstration election to recycle a political arrangement that was despised by the people governed. The error was compounded by a large dose of stupidity: not only did the regime steal the election results, they manufactured a landslide win for Ahmadinejad that even their most faithful adherents could not justify.

Initially, the prospect of an election was treated with disinterest, if not contempt, by the population. But as the campaign progressed, the forces of reform began congregating around a most unlikely symbol of possibility of reform.

Opposition candidate Moussavi is a most unlikely symbol of reform. He agreed with the basic policies of the clerical oligarchy that has kept Iran in its grip. He was prime minister during the bloody Iran-Iraq war. He is closely identified with a faction of the almighty clergy.

But he was a symbol nevertheless: not for what he stood for but for the possibility of change he could be an instrument of.

The election campaign unveiled a reality the clerical oligarchy had tried to conceal: there was not one but two Irans. There was the old Iran and the new Iran.

The old Iran was a country of aging leaders and aged ideologies. It was a repressive country, policed by thugs of the Revolutionary Guards and the cruelty of the mullahs who used religion as a cloak to conceal the oligarchy they had established — an oligarchy that enriched the clerical elite and their closest allies while keeping modernity at bay.

The new Iran draws from the demographic facts. Two thirds of the population was under the age of 33. Iran has the highest level of internet access among all the Islamic countries in that part of the world. Its young people were the most westernized in the Middle East even if the ruling clique was stridently anti-western.

Oppressive as the official doctrine might be, it could not convince the two-thirds of the population born after the anti-monarchical revolution that the way to the future was to return to the past. Religion might have been given great importance in daily life but that could not dissuade the population from contemplating the state of their economy and the opportunities lost each day because of incompetent, archaic leadership.

It might not be apparent from the superficial images of angry mullahs and fanatical crowds, but Iran is a highly literate society. Its publishing industry is robust. The great works of science and engineering, of art and technology are all extensively translated and widely available. And then there is that truly impressive internet penetration rate.

The election campaign pitted the new Iran against the old Iran. The hundreds of thousands of Iranians who have been occupying the streets the past few days do not just want Moussavi to replace Ahmadinejad. Soon it will be clear they want a new social order to displace one that has become dysfunctional.

The mullahs are not fans of the populist Ahmadinejad. This raving politician, who started out as mayor of Tehran, edged out the candidate of the mullahs the first time around. But given the constituency that had formed around Moussavi, the mullahs would rather have the raging conservative fool than a moderate around whose neck hangs the great expectations for modernity of the constituency he managed to attract.

Neither Ahmadinejad nor Moussavi completely grasp the profound fissures in Iranian society that elections have uncovered. On the surface, the two political gladiators might appear to be pawns of contending factions of the clerical oligarchy. If we zoom out to appreciate the historical proportions of this present confrontation, the two are really pawns of two societies — the old and the new — that the political order, in its present form, could no longer hold together.

This is why the whole world is so engrossed at what is unfolding in the streets of Iran’s cities. There is a great historical question here that must be resolved conclusively over the next few days.