Election in Iran

On 8 June, twenty days before the presidential election, there was no sense in Tehran that voting was imminent. The streets were still swathed in official mourning for President Ebrahim Raisi, killed in a helicopter crash in the northern forests on 19 May. In death he has been elevated to Seyyed Ayatollah Doctor Martyr Raisi. Billboards showed him managing the Covid crisis, greeting Revolutionary Guard commanders or meeting anonymous ‘regional’ rebels, with slogans to remind us that his loss hasn’t dented the country’s identity or priorities: ‘still jihad’, ‘still security’, ‘still populist’, ‘still spiritual’. After the accident, some senior figures cast doubt on whether death by helicopter crash in stormy weather qualified him for martyrdom. Others suggested he had died in ‘a martyr-like manner’. The mourning billboards resolved the ambiguity by declaring him a ‘martyr to service’, a new category of political sacrifice.

There was no public campaigning yet, because the clerical body that vets candidates had not yet announced who would be permitted to run. According to the constitution only a rajol-e siyasi, a political man, is eligible to be president. This is an ambiguous term that the Islamic Republic has never clearly defined, but state radio set out some generic conditions: he should be capable of sound political analysis, he should have public stature and a strong reputation. The presenter’s tone was unctuous. The segment cut to a nationalist monologue on the importance of protecting Iran’s borders and sovereignty. The stakes, the presenter said, were high: everyone had a responsibility to vote for the sake of the nation. Suddenly, everyone’s political perspective mattered.

Most Iranians don’t rely on state television for their news. The two main networks that broadcast Persian TV news are both based in London. BBC Persian operates out of Broadcasting House. On 8 June, it reminded viewers that the election was imminent and the Guardian Council would soon announce the candidates. Iran International, which seems to be owned by a Saudi national and to align itself with the pro-Israel faction in the Gulf, treated the election as an irrelevant affair. It ran a clip sent by a viewer showing a sink of unwashed dishes, with a voiceover ranting that the water had been cut off for two days and cursing the government. ‘Death to all of you!’ he shouted.

The network then shifted to coverage of the Israeli raid on Nuseirat refugee camp that secured the release of four hostages. There was film of the hostages embracing their families and joyful demonstrations in Tel Aviv. There was no footage of the death and destruction the raid inflicted on Palestinians. The presenters said that ‘tens’ were ‘reportedly’ killed and turned to a source in Tel Aviv who repeated Israeli claims that the death toll was less than a hundred.

The next day I drove downtown to pick up my new ID card. It had taken two years: the materials needed to produce a chip card with holograms are apparently covered by sanctions. The woman serving me had sparkly green nails and letters tattooed on her hand that happen to be my initials, which I took as a good omen. On my way out, a woman behind a booth stopped me to say I needed to buy a set of sticker codes to replace my card quickly if it got lost. Her explanation was convoluted – there were different coloured stickers, each corresponding to a different type of mishap – and she told me about a lucky woman who had bought the stickers and was instantly able to replace her card at the airport, so she didn’t miss her flight. I asked if she was a government worker and if they were government or private codes. Private, she said, but I would bitterly regret not having bought them. Someone intervened on my behalf, saying that I would return with my husband to buy the stickers. ‘Her husband! What does he have to do with it?’ she said, laughing. ‘Did you hear that?’ she called loudly to another woman, who was collecting charity donations. ‘She wants to come back with her husband!’ I rushed out, embarrassed. Patriarchy is unheard of round here.

On the way home I passed a large group of women in chador outside a government building. Some were sitting on the pavement, others standing in a queue. At first I thought they might be protesting but it turned out they were teachers, trying to collect their unpaid salaries.

That evening we learned which candidates were allowed to run for president. There was no explanation as to why a former president, half of Raisi’s cabinet and a former speaker of parliament had been excluded, or a previously disqualified candidate was now included. Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the current speaker and a former air force commander, police chief and mayor of Tehran, was clearly the leading candidate. This is his fourth presidential run. In 2005 he courted the urban middle-class liberal vote, running around the city wearing Ray-Bans and posing with his plane. Nobody was persuaded. Today that social stratum is completely alienated from politics and Qalibaf long ago dropped the pretence of being interested in their vote.

There is one reformist candidate among the six, the Tabriz MP Masoud Pezeshkian. He is what he appears to be: a decent provincial MP with a clean political record and no charisma. On Instagram and other social media, the leading figures of the so-called reformist camp, who have been intermittently excluded from Iranian politics for fifteen years, tried to conjure some enthusiasm for Pezeshkian. But there were few signs in the city of enthusiasm for any of the candidates.

I stopped by a bookshop to pick up some books for my son. The bestsellers haven’t changed for years: Animal Farm, Sherry Argov’s Why Men Love Bitches (softened in Persian to ‘Clever Women’), a biography of the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum. The last time I was here I asked one of the booksellers if she knew that al-Maktoum imprisoned his daughters. ‘I don’t care what he does with his personal life,’ she said, ‘look at the state of his country.’ Wooden chairs and tables with chocolate biscuits were set out in one corner in preparation for a discussion of Stefan Zweig’s novella The Royal Game.

Aclock was put up in Palestine Square in 2017 to count down the days until the destruction of Israel as predicted by Ayatollah Khamenei. This month it got stuck on 6038 for two days. During the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, Tehran was covered in murals depicting US police violence and ridiculing American hypocrisy on human rights. But now, as global public opinion turns against Israel because of the war on Gaza, there is no political signalling or gloating in Tehran, no billboards celebrating the axis of resistance, the military leverage of Hizbullah bearing down on Israel’s northern border. Ordinary Iranians see little to celebrate. The most colossal billboard in town, above Hafte Tir Square, announces that ‘Elections Are No One’s Monopoly’: not the clergy, not political parties (Iran doesn’t technically have parties anyway); the people’s destiny is in their own hands.

The white vans of the morality police are back but now they are unmarked. The state prefers to enforce hijab indirectly these days, through digital surveillance and fines, and by outsourcing enforcement to staff at restaurants and cafés. Only one of the candidates defends hijab enforcement. The others say that policing the hijab shouldn’t be a priority when corruption and injustice are rampant; women deserve to feel secure on the street; rough and lawless morality policing makes young people hostile to religion. Since no state body takes formal responsibility for morality policing, candidates can’t say they will dismantle it, even as an empty campaign promise.

I was told to cover my hair three times in the course of a week. The first time was at an international food expo at a sprawling complex built by the shah in the 1970s. Sanctions mean that Iran must be self-sufficient in food production and the sector is flourishing, despite 40 per cent inflation. Now the Russians are coming in search of gum, soap, tomato paste, laundry detergent. Dozens of halls were filled with stands for more than seven hundred Iranian companies, as well as a hundred from Russia, China, India, Thailand, Turkey, the UAE and a handful of European countries. Five years ago, a woman told me mournfully, this hall was full of Europeans.

There were Iranian companies selling pasta, cooking sauces, jam and coffee capsules. Some of the stands’ décor belied their products. One condiment-maker’s booth was done up in cream and brown, with plush furniture and good lighting: perhaps they would rather have been selling lingerie or high-end handbags than lemon and dill sauce. The energy drink sector occupied nearly half a hall. A mixologist juggled cocktail shakers and flames to the sound of pulsing Maghrebi house music.

Women were in charge of many of the booths and at least half of them did not have their hair covered, despite the polite request in the brochure. The dress code was Islamic Republic business casual, which for women means suits, even with cropped trousers, heels, belts. ‘My darling, my darling, my darling,’ an insistent voice grew louder behind my ear. I turned round. A woman with severe eyebrows in a black chador waved her hand at the four inches of throat exposed by my linen caftan. ‘Cover, cover,’ she said urgently, as though I might catch fire if I didn’t. I was taken aback. After all, I was dressed more modestly than almost every woman in the hall. I even had a bandana over my hair.

I forgot in the moment that morality policing isn’t really about morality or modesty. It is selectively and arbitrarily enforced: selective because there are certain venues where it’s never enforced; and arbitrary because enforcers know they risk an angry response from the women they target or supportive passers-by. An altercation could be filmed on a mobile phone and sent to Iran International, which would air it between segments in which Israeli analysts and spokespeople defend the killing of large numbers of Palestinian civilians. As a result, enforcers often pick on modestly dressed women they suspect won’t scream at them. That woman was certainly right about me. I slunk away to hide behind a ketchup assembly line.

That evening, there was no chance that morality police would appear in the restaurant where I had dinner. It occupied the ground floor of a black marble tower owned and frequented by the state-affiliated nouveau riche. Slim women with designer handbags and uncovered hair ate fish tacos. There was hip-hop in the background. Outside, several black BMWs obstructed the narrow street. No one was remotely anxious.

As the election campaign got going, Tehran was covered with moralising billboards. ‘Speaking ill, insults and gutter talk hurt national dignity,’ one read. Another suggested that we ‘allow ethics to rule.’ A neighbour’s son was getting engaged, and the young woman’s family wanted seven hundred gold coins as a dowry (in Iran, the dowry is paid to the bride rather than the other way round). They were, they said, traditional. My mother’s dowry was a hyacinth stem and a book of poetry. The dowry game is a bleak outcome of the Islamic Republic’s discriminatory family law. Divorce, alimony and child custody laws are so unfavourable to women that they seek leverage in marriage and possible divorce by demanding ever inflating and outlandish dowries: the woman’s weight in gold and so on. A married woman can ‘activate’ her dowry at any time and the man can be imprisoned if he can’t pay. These dynamics have made marriage an unattractive prospect and the state has no answer. To rescue the country’s economy would require a new style of government, with new laws and new agreements with other nations. Instead, they put up billboards advocating a modest marriage and a life of poverty. One showed a piece of cheese and a heart-shaped loaf of bread: ‘easy marriage, a lifetime of love’. My neighbours convened a summit with the prospective groom’s parents.

The televised debates have not made this an exciting election, but they have conveyed that it is different from the last, when Raisi was elected as a proxy for Ayatollah Khamenei in a controlled, vetted process that seemed to seal the end of electoral politics in the Islamic Republic. Qalibaf’s billboards were the first to go up, and he has twice as many as the other candidates. His demeanour in the TV debates was that of a regime statesman with victory already assured. In Trumpian fashion, he has promised to build a wall on the Afghan border to keep out refugees and put forward his entitled daughter to defend him against corruption charges. The only cleric on the ballot, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, who has spent decades serving the system at the highest levels, is the unexpected spoiler: attacking the right from the right and contradicting other conservatives with recollections from meetings he himself attended.

Pourmohammadi’s interventions are helping Pezeshkian, whose political skills have not improved much since the start of the campaign: his strategy seems to be to try to emanate decency. On the issue of hijab, which occupied much of one debate, he directly contradicted the supreme leader. The problem, he said, is not loose hijab or insufficient hijab, but the fact that a significant number of women refuse to wear a head covering at all. They see that freedom as their right. Pezeshkian said that just as Reza Shah failed to impose mandatory unveiling, so the Islamic Republic will fail – has failed – to impose the headscarf. The conversation was a bold one for state television, but disconnected from the reality that women suffer the daily consequences of the state’s refusal to drop the requirement.

The driving force behind Pezeshkian’s campaign is Mohammad Javad Zarif, a former foreign minister and widely acknowledged – even by one of the Shah’s top officials – as the country’s most skilled diplomat in living memory. He led the negotiating team that agreed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, which resulted in the lifting of sanctions in 2016. He is a fiery and politically sophisticated speaker. It is regrettable, one conservative newspaper complained, that Iranian candidates are borrowing from American campaigning styles.

On the three major issues driving Iran’s steep decline – the collapsing economy, relations with the West and the state’s refusal to give women citizenship rights – none of the candidates has explicit solutions. The frontrunners don’t oppose negotiations with the US, though they disagree about modalities. Qalibaf has suggested an incremental approach to nuclear negotiations, in exchange for lifting sanctions on Iran’s oil sales. In any case, major policy shifts aren’t decided by the executive.

Looming over all this is the prospect of a Trump presidency, which will raise anxieties about war and further damage to the economy. A Trump administration will want a new nuclear deal and more concessions from Tehran, whose leverage is greatly reduced (apart from its close to bomb-grade nuclear enrichment capacity). This scenario may be the reason why the election has been slightly more competitive than expected. But the experiment in opening political space in Iran comes late to an exhausted and bitter electorate. Turnout on Friday is impossible to estimate. Demographics in Iran have shifted considerably in the past decade as a result of sanctions and the dependable engine of change, the urban middle class, is now impoverished, alienated and diminished. Many people have left the country. Will those who remain think this election has anything to offer them? There is very little graffiti in Tehran anymore, but last week I saw scrawled on a wall in the city centre: ‘Alone, tired, numb, sad.’

26 June 2024