Iran's Remarkable Election

Shaul Bakhash

In May 1997, the Islamic Republic of Iran presented the world the remarkable spectacle of an autocratic, repressive regime that bans political parties holding a free and fair presidential election. In a hard-fought and highly competitive contest, former minister of culture Mohammad Khatami gained an upset victory over Speaker of the Majlis (parliament) Ali Akbar Nateq-Nuri, winning almost 70 percent of the vote to become the Islamic Republic's fifth president. According to the government, turnout topped 80 percent, a figure not reached since the early years of the revolution. Even allowing for the possibility of some official inflation of turnout statistics, anecdotal evidence suggests that large numbers of people (especially women, young people, and members of the middle class) went to the polls this time after not having bothered to vote in several previous elections. Moreover, the ballots were properly counted, the results publicly announced, and the voters' mandate accepted by the regime.

In evaluating the significance of this election, of course, certain unusual institutional features of the Islamic Republic must be kept in mind. First, although Iran's president runs the government and appoints cabinet ministers (subject to confirmation by the Majlis), he does not hold the country's highest office. Ultimate authority rests with the Supreme Leader or rahbarÑalso known as the faqih (Islamic jurist)Ñwho is selected from among the country's leading clerics by the clerically dominated but popularly elected Assembly of Experts. The [End Page 80] Supreme Leader, not the president, appoints the chiefs of the military and security forces, the head of the judiciary and of the broadcasting services, and the clerical members of the Council of Guardians, a watchdog body that can strike down any legislation that it deems violative of Islam or the 1979 Constitution. The Supreme Leader is constitutionally empowered to set the broad policies of the Islamic Republic, and in practice he has acquired additional means of interfering in the running of the government.

Second, the Islamic Republic requires that anyone wishing to run for the presidency must be approved by the Council of Guardians. In 1997, with two-term incumbent Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani barred by the Constitution from running again, the Council approved only four out of a large field of such applicants. While most of those rejected were not serious candidates, a number of representatives from legitimate, if officially unrecognized, political groups were barred from running. The election was basically a restricted competition among members of the ruling elite, and became a race between the two front-runners, Nateq-Nuri and Khatami.

Yet this does not mean that no significant differences separated the two leading candidates. Although Khatami is also a member of the clerical elite, the ruling establishment clearly favored the more conservative Nateq-Nuri. The country's most powerful clerical organization, the influential Friday prayer leaders in almost all the major cities, the majority of members of parliament, the majority of members of the Council of Guardians, the minister of intelligence, and, most important, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei all explicitly or implicitly endorsed Nateq-Nuri. The overwhelming popular vote for Khatami in the face of these endorsements represented an incontrovertible "No" to the ruling clerical establishment and a demand for change--for an easing of political, social, and cultural restrictions; for improved economic conditions; and for a greater say in determining the country's policies. Khatami won, moreover, with a campaign that stressed the rule of law, tolerance for a multiplicity of views, wider political participation, social justice, and the need to strengthen the institutions of civil society. It was this message, along with Khatami's palpable moderation, that powerfully resonated with the electorate.

Rise of the Hard-Liners

The election of Khatami was the more striking because hard-liners had been gaining ground in the years preceding the election. In the three years immediately following the death of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, a period that coincided with Rafsanjani's first term as president, social and cultural (though not political) controls had actually been eased. Beginning in 1992, however, this limited liberalization ran into [End Page 81] trouble. A conservative Majlis banned satellite-television dish antennas; secured the resignation of Khatami as minister of culture and Islamic guidance because his policies toward film, theater, and publishing were considered too liberal; and then forced the resignation of Rafsanjani's brother as head of the state-controlled radio and television networks for similar reasons. The Supreme Leader himself led a campaign against the Western "cultural onslaught," shorthand for the Western music, films, television programs, and forms of dress attractive to the younger generation, and a thinly disguised attack on Iran's Western-oriented intelligentsia and their prominence in the arts.

The security services, led by the Ministry of Intelligence, also gained greater influence and freedom from accountability during these years. For example, in November 1994, writer and translator Ali Akbar Saidi-Sirjani, who had been arrested on fabricated charges of spying, homosexuality, and drug use, died in police custody, allegedly of a heart attack. A number of other writers were found dead in suspicious circumstances. Several newspapers and magazines were suspended or shut down.

In April 1997, much to the anger and embarrassment of the government, a German court indicted Iranian intelligence minister Reza Fallahian and implicated Iran's highest officials in the 1992 assassination of the leader of Iran's Kurdish Democratic Party and three companions in a Berlin restaurant. This was one of several assassinations of Iranian opposition figures in Europe attributed to the Ministry of Intelligence.

With the government's connivance, or at least acquiescence, some clerics began once again to deploy squads of club-wielding bully-boys, known as the Ansar-e Hezbollah (Helpers of the Party of God), to break up meetings organized by the political opposition or by those advocating views unwelcome to the regime. The Ansar trashed the offices of the publisher of a novel deemed disrespectful to Islam, torched a bookstore, and attacked female bicyclists in a Tehran park. They were also utilized to prevent the Islamic thinker and philosopher Abdul Karim Soroush from addressing university students on at least three campuses in Tehran and Isfahan. Soroush has built up a large following among students, lay intellectuals, and even seminarians by arguing for an Islam that is pluralistic, tolerant, open to change and interpretation, and compatible with democracy. By arguing against the clerical monopoly over the interpretation of the sources of Islamic law, he has implicitly challenged the clerical claim to a monopoly of political authority.

The politicization of the Council of Guardians was a further indication of the erosion of constitutional checks and balances. One Council member, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati, championed the Ansar on the grounds that devoted Muslims were required to act when the government failed to suppress corruption and un-Islamic activities. The [End Page 82] Council of Guardians handed down decisions that significantly reduced the representation of the radical clerical faction in the 1992 parliament and that favored conservative clerics in the 1996 voting for the Majlis.

The rise of hard-liners was also evident in the shift that took place in the relative influence of Rafsanjani and Khamenei, who had run Iran as a diumvirate following Khomeini's death. The two worked closely together, but whereas Rafsanjani was inclined to moderate Iran's foreign policy and to ease social, cultural, and press restrictions, Khamenei favored the hard-liners. After 1992, Khamenei increasingly came to dominate the relationship.

The presidential election thus took place against a background that appeared particularly inhospitable to a "reform" candidate, to a campaign that offered a real choice to the voters, or to the fair conduct of the balloting. The history of past presidential elections pointed in the same direction. Aside from the first election for president in 1980, the outcome of each subsequent election (1981, 1985, 1989, and 1993) was for all intents and purposes predetermined.

That the 1997 election turned out differently is attributable to four factors: 1) the continuing vibrancy and energy of Iranian civil society; 2) a political system that is severely restricted but still offers opportunities for intraregime factionalism and competition; 3) fortuitous events--the ebb and flow of daily politics and the small and large decisions taken by individuals and key players as they responded to day-to-day developments; and 4) the personality of Khatami himself.

Civil Society: Precarious but Vigorous

While the Iranian regime is autocratic, often ruthless in its treatment of critics, and, at least in certain areas, totalitarian in intent, its reach has limits. Iran has a large and vigorous middle class. Literacy is high among school-age children. The revolution and the political upheavals of the last 20 years have politicized important segments of the populace. The hand of the state rests heavily on all Iranians, and few professional associations or publications operate without some interference by the government. But there is also a sense in which society stands apart from and in opposition to the state. Women have carved out space for themselves by resisting the Islamic dress code, insisting on the right to work, and securing the restoration of some legal rights introduced under the monarchy and suspended after the revolution. In the privacy of their homes, Iranians watch CNN, Baywatch, and other foreign broadcasts via satellite; they listen to popular music, dance, play cards, and drink alcohol. Young men and women cannot fraternize on university campuses, but they meet, right under the watchful eyes of the morals police, while hiking and picnicking on Fridays among the foothills of Tehran. These may not appear as acts of great political consequence, but [End Page 83] they reflect the many ways in which society, or groups within it, keep at bay the repressive instincts of the state. In small ways, these acts also turn homes and streets into a sphere of contestation where people from all walks of life seek to widen the space in which the state allows them to operate.

Although the press is censored and outspoken editors and writers are punished, literary and quasi-political journals such as Kiyan, Goftegu, Kelk, and Iran-e Farda have managed to keep alive a vigorous debate on literary issues and such subjects as civil society, the relationship of state and religion, and the role of clerics in government. Kiyan publishes the essays through which Soroush has dramatically altered the context and the very language in which religion and even politics are discussed in Iran.

Why the state permits these magazines to publish is not so great a puzzle as it might at first appear to be. The censors have assumed (wrongly as it turned out) that discussions of concepts such as civil society are not harmful as long as discourse remains general and avoids direct criticism of the form of government prevailing in the Islamic Republic. Officials wish to provide some outlet for students, the educated, and the intellectually restless. The Ministry of Culture may wish to control the content of films, but independent directors like Abbas Kiarostami make movies that win prestigious international prizes like the Palme d'Or at Cannes, providing a reflected glory in which the Ministry can bask.

Even though the separation between state and society in certain areas is sharp and confrontational, in others it is more complex and ambiguous. Most Iranians look on the security agencies, the morals police, and the revolutionary committees as instruments of repression, pure and simple. To the intelligentsia, censorship is a deadening and threatening presence. The judiciary is not an independent shield for rights, but a tool that the state uses to punish dissidents and confiscate the property of supposed miscreants for the benefit of the ruling elite and their minions. Publishing firms, professional associations, and nonregime political groups operate at state sufferance and with some state interference. Even independent publications, lacking foreign exchange, depend on state-subsidized newsprint that the Culture Ministry doles out generously to friends and parsimoniously to critics. Independent film makers, theater groups, and dramatists may need official funding or access to state-run facilities in order to operate. The government interferes in the elections of professional bodies such as the bar association and the medical association (though the latter enjoys limited autonomy). Various government agencies operate publishing houses, newspapers, film studios, think tanks, and cultural centers that compete with the private sector in the production of culture.

Yet public space exists, even if in a restricted form. Publications and [End Page 84] associations are not simply instruments of the state, and some constantly test the limits of the freedom that the government will allow. Many of those who work in the official cultural and intellectual institutions resemble their nongovernmental counterparts in their desire to engage the cultural and political issues that are current in the outside world. At times the level of repression and control is high; at other times, as in the 1997 presidential elections, a confluence of factors broadens the scope of free civic space. Independent publications and loose groups of citizens will then move, as they did during the presidential campaign, to occupy part of the public space, to speak out, and to influence the political process.

The Wages of Elite Factionalism

The clerical community dominates the state and politics, but it is not united. There are divisions between the "political" clerics who hold power and those who, fearing for the integrity of the religious establishment, eschew involvement with the state. Since the 1979 revolution, the regime has both repressed and tolerated dissidents among its own ranks. It has dealt harshly with senior clerics who question the involvement of the clergy in politics or the constitutional principle--on which the very foundations of the Islamic Republic rest--that ultimate authority is vested in the Supreme Leader. Ayatollah Hosain Ali Montazeri was dismissed in 1989 as Khomeini's designated successor after he criticized the mistreatment and execution of political prisoners, the suppression of the press, and inadequate consultation by Khomeini with his colleagues. Several senior clerics, Montazeri among them, remain under virtual house arrest. They are not allowed to speak on public issues and are limited to teaching only small numbers of students because they have questioned Khamenei's qualifications to hold the highest office or claim rights to it for themselves.

The regime also tolerates within its own ranks factions that differ significantly over major questions of policy and ideology. These groups are permitted in part because their basic loyalty to the revolution and the Islamic Republic is not in doubt. Besides, the ruling clerics are linked together by family ties and intermarriage, patronage networks, and durable friendships formed in the seminary or during the struggle against the monarchy. In practice, this means that while political infighting and rivalries can be quite sharp, the losers survive. After 1992, for instance, left-wing clerics were squeezed out of parliament and government, but two of the most radical among them were permitted to establish newspapers. One of these papers, Salaam, has became an important voice of dissent within the ruling elite.

The most senior clerics have traditionally enjoyed a degree of independence as regards their opinions on religious matters--an [End Page 85] independence which, in highly politicized times, spills over into the political sphere. They enjoy large followings among seminarians and believers, whose donations give them quasi-independent revenues. For example, Ayatollah Taheri, the Friday prayer leader of Isfahan, sided with his own townspeople in protesting the decision of the Council of Guardians to void the election of a controversial independent candidate during the 1996 parliamentary elections.

The ruling clerics and their lay allies are organized in a number of loosely structured associations that reflect political divisions and a range of views. The two most important clerical organizations are the Association of the Combatant Clerics of Tehran and the Society of Militant Clerics. The Combatant Clerics number among their ranks most of the leading "political" clerics and are conservative on social, cultural, and women's issues. They depict themselves as committed to the deprived classes, but have close ties to the bazaar merchants and the shopkeepers. A defender of clerical prerogatives, the Combatant Clerics' Association has also strongly supported the claim that the Supreme Leader deserves the absolute obedience of all Iranians.

The Militant Clerics--whom the Iranian press describes as belonging to the "leftist" or "radical" part of the political spectrum--began as a breakaway faction of the Combatant Clerics, from whom they split over issues of both policy and personality. The Militant Clerics and their nonclerical allies dominated the government in the late 1980s. Committed to state control of the economy (including prices), subsidies for the poor, and distributive justice, the group opposed the privatization program that Rafsanjani pursued (with limited success) in the 1990s. Under their leader Mehdi Karrubi, they charged that these policies resulted in windfall profits, income disparities, and the rise of an undeserving business class. They also argued for the prerogatives of the Majlis against the claims of the Supreme Leader. Through a kind of constitutional gerrymandering (and with some help from the Council of Guardians), Rafsanjani managed virtually to exclude the Militant Clerics from the Majlis that was elected in 1992, and then gradually shut them out of senior government positions as well. They reemerged to play an active role in the 1997 presidential elections, however.

A third group, calling itself the Servants of Construction, was formed by 16 high-ranking civil servants only three months before the 1996 parliamentary elections. Its founders included ten cabinet ministers, four deputies to the president, the governor of the Central Bank, and the mayor of Tehran--all men closely associated with President Rafsanjani. The group was put together to keep alive Rafsanjani's policies and legacy in the face of the increasingly conservative, bazaar-oriented trend in parliament. In contrast to the Association of Combatant Clerics (of which Rafsanjani is himself a prominent member), the Servants of Construction is an organization composed primarily of lay technocrats. [End Page 86] In the elections it presented itself as a group committed to encouraging entrepreneurial and industrial capitalism rather than traders and the bazaar, and inclined to allow more freedom in social and cultural affairs. Despite its late entry into the field, the Construction group and its allies managed to elect 80 candidates, giving them almost 30 percent of the seats in the 270-member Majlis. The Combatant Clerics and their allies, however, held on to as many as 140 seats.

A number of smaller groups also matter, as do certain associations that are not organized for the purpose of electoral politics but which carry political weight. The Association of the Seminary Teachers of Qum speaks for the senior instructors in the complex of religious colleges there. In recent years it has played an important, if informal, role in according recognition to the most senior and respected Islamic jurists, and its endorsement is eagerly sought by candidates and by officials eager to have clerical sanction for controversial policy initiatives. The Friday prayer leaders in the big provincial cities often play an important role in the politics of their regions.

Although political parties are not permitted in the Islamic Republic, the large factions display some, though not all, of the attributes of parties. They elect officers, hold regular meetings, present slates of candidates and (generally vague) platforms in elections, form parliamentary caucuses, and negotiate and form alliances with one another for electoral and parliamentary purposes. But membership is tiny, generally no more than several dozen activists and their acolytes. Patronage and mosque and clerical networks provide these factions with rudimentary means for mobilizing voters. But in towns and cities especially, appeals must reach the wider, unorganized public. In the 1997 presidential election, Khatami's organization proved especially adept at mobilizing the unorganized voter and cutting into the traditional support bases of the Combatant Clerics' Association and the clerical establishment.

The existence of these political factions (along with daily newspapers that support them) does not invariably translate into meaningful political competition, even within the ruling elite. The years following the 1992 parliamentary elections, for example, were generally politically quiescent. The dominant Khamenei-Rafsanjani diumvirate marginalized the Society of Militant Clerics and its left-wing allies. Yet the existence of different political "lines" (as the Iranian press calls them) among the elite means that there is potential for meaningful politics. This turned out to be the case to a limited degree in the 1996 parliamentary elections, and to a fuller degree in the 1997 presidential balloting. In these instances, the issues and competing visions advanced by the leading factions were posed in clearer terms. The search for allies drew in the smaller factions. Infighting spilled over into the daily press; as it grew more outspoken, so did the independent weekly and monthly journals. In the competition for [End Page 87] votes, the factions were compelled to appeal to a larger public, making wider political participation possible.

The 1996 parliamentary elections were shaped primarily by a split between Rafsanjani's technocrats, who controlled the cabinet and government, and the Association of Combatant Clerics under Nateq-Nuri, who controlled parliament and looked set to win the presidency in 1997. Ironically, the Rafsanjani technocrats decided to form the Servants of Construction and go their own way only after the Combatant Clerics rejected their proposal to form a joint slate of 5 pro-Rafsanjani candidates and 25 Combatant Clerics candidates to run for the 30 seats in the Tehran-area Majlis district. This rebuff turned the election into a contest, encouraging smaller groups to campaign energetically as well. (The Militant Clerics, still nursing their wounds and skeptical that the elections would be fair even in a narrow sense, sat out the campaign).

The Servants of Construction proved effective campaigners despite their inexperience. They set up a network of offices and support groups in many parts of the country. In this they were helped by their identification with Rafsanjani, a formidable political figure who has contacts and is owed favors all over the country. The emergence of a centrist, technocratic faction--something of a first for the Islamic Republic--also drew followers. Bazaar merchants and businessmen poured money into both sides in the campaign. In the end, the Combatant Clerics retained their majority, while the Servants of Construction won their large 80-seat bloc. The Construction group, moreover, had created a new political organization, had given respectability to the idea of a political faction not centered on clerics and religious issues, and had utilized new ways (for Iran) of campaigning. They had also aroused voter interest by creating an open breach within the ruling coalition. The 1996 elections were a dress rehearsal for the more significant presidential race of the following year.

The Politics of the 1997 Election

The 1997 presidential race might easily have gone the way of previous such elections. Khatami's candidacy was more the result of happenstance than planning; and Nateq-Nuri appeared to have an early lock. A number of developments helped to sharpen factional rivalries, however, and the campaign that resulted gave voters a real choice.

The regime, hungry for proof of its continued popularity, wanted a large turnout (Khamenei himself called for a vote of 30 million). Since this would require a credible contest, the leaders needed at least one believable candidate to run against Nateq-Nuri. The Servants of Construction, disheartened by Nateq-Nuri's early lead, deliberated for weeks but could not come up with a viable candidate. In the meantime, Khamenei had been encouraging the Society of Militant Clerics to end [End Page 88] their boycott and participate in the elections. He may have seen this as a means of increasing voter interest and bolstering his own role as final arbiter among factions. The Militant Clerics, rueing their decision to sit out the 1996 parliamentary elections (the smaller factions, after all, had picked up seats), responded to the invitation with alacrity.

They turned to Khatami only by default, after the Supreme Leader discouraged their first choice, former prime minister Mir Hosain Musavi, from running. ¹ A reluctant Khatami agreed to run only on the condition that he could be an independent candidate rather than the official standardbearer of the Militant Clerics. So unpromising did his candidacy appear that the Servants of Construction took another two weeks before they agreed to join the Militant Clerics in endorsing him.

A number of factors combined to turn Khatami's tentative campaign into a winning one. First, the official endorsements of Nateq-Nuri appear to have backfired. Many Iranians resented the sense that Nateq-Nuri was being forced down their throats. It was widely known that the Supreme Leader preferred Nateq-Nuri. The Friday prayer leaders in major cities who endorsed Nateq-Nuri were all Khamenei appointees. On the eve of the balloting, Khamenei said that Iranians would not vote for a candidate who would be "soft" toward America, a remark widely interpreted as a reference to Khatami. Clerics were everywhere urging Iranians to vote; but when Khamenei instructed them also to indicate who was "the best qualified" to be president, this became an excuse for the abandonment of any pretense at neutrality and the wholesale endorsement of Nateq-Nuri by most clerics. Some clerics told the faithful it was their "religious duty" to vote for Nateq-Nuri. When it became clear that most of the members of the artistic community favored and might campaign for Khatami, the minister of culture issued a directive instructing cultural associations to avoid endorsing specific candidates--a move that aroused considerable resentment. A number of clerics backing Nateq-Nuri charged that the Khatami camp wanted to exclude the clergy from politics and create a secular state. For a public already disillusioned with the ruling clerics, these official endorsements provided further reason to vote for Khatami.

Second, officials grew concerned that the impression the election was being rigged in Nateq-Nuri's favor would result in a low turnout. This led both Khamenei and Rafsanjani to issue statements guaranteeing the freedom of the elections. Somehow these pledges were believed in the closing days of the campaign, and helped to ensure a large turnout.

Third, Khatami benefited from effective organization. The Servants of Construction put to good use the experience they had acquired during the 1996 parliamentary elections to organize for Khatami a nationwide campaign of posters, speeches, newspaper supplements, and the like. Khatami also was able to attract many enthusiastic young volunteers to his campaign. By election day, his campaign claimed that it had four hundred campaign offices across the country. If true, this would suggest [End Page 89] a new style of campaign organization in Iran, with implications for future parliamentary and presidential campaigns. Tehran mayor Gholam Hosain Karbaschi, a Rafsanjani protégé, threw behind the Khatami campaign the support of his widely read newspaper Hamshahri and the considerable resources that his office made available to him in the capital city, which is home to more than a tenth of Iran's population of about 60 million.

Nateq-Nuri was far more successful than Khatami in gaining clerical endorsements. Yet the scramble for endorsements, which always play a role in Iranian elections, led the factions to seek and secure the endorsement of student associations, cultural associations, artists, athletes, associations of ethnic groups resident in the capital, and the like, involving larger numbers of people in the campaign. Although many members of the artistic community initially were cowed by the minister of culture's directive and adopted a posture of public neutrality toward the race, by the end of the campaign they were signing manifestoes on Khatami's behalf.

Fourth, while the state-controlled television network appeared to favor Nateq-Nuri in its election coverage, the press played an important role in providing a forum for a wide range of views during the election campaign. Much of this was partisan, but it created a better informed public, and analysis of the politics of the election in the weekly and monthly press was often very good. Finally, Khatami himself and his message played a highly significant role in determining the outcome of the election. The election showed once again that personality--and one man's ideas--can be a force in politics.

The Accidental President

Khatami had little previous experience as a campaigner, having run only once for election (to the first parliament in 1981). During the last three years of his long tenure (1982-92) as minister of culture and Islamic guidance, he lifted many restrictions on magazine and book publishing, cinema, theater, and the arts. This, along with the fact that parliament had forced his resignation, stood him in good stead with the intelligentsia and the politically aware. His reputation for financial probity became more widely known in the course of the campaign and stood in sharp contrast to the corruption or business connections and wealth attributed to most of the other ruling clerics.

The little-known Khatami proved to have a winning personality. He spoke well, dispensed with the trappings of power that surround high officials in Iran, and adopted an attractive simplicity. Whereas Rafsanjani, as president, and Nateq-Nuri, as Speaker of the Majlis, often used helicopters on provincial tours or campaign stops, Khatami drove around in a Paykan, the small car that most ordinary Iranian motorists own. [End Page 90]

Khatami's message was perhaps even more important than his style. His emphasis on the rule of law resonated with a public used to arbitrary behavior by the courts and the security agencies. In a country where the morals police enter homes to confiscate satellite dishes or arrest young boys and girls for partying or listening to Western music together, Khatami said the government should not interfere with what people do in the privacy of their homes. When Khatami said intellectuals have a right to personal security, listeners understood the reference to the secret arrests and mysterious deaths of writers over the last few years. His remark that political authority should not be the monopoly of one group pointed to clerical monopoly of the state. He repeatedly emphasized the need for a society-wide dialogue on issues before the country. In contrast to the routine demonization of the West in clerical discourse, he said Iran had much to learn from Western civilization and spoke not of a "clash" but rather a "dialogue" between civilizations.

Khatami also paid particular attention to youth and women, who voted for him in large numbers. The minimum voting age in Iran is only 15, and slightly more than a quarter of all Iranians are between that age and 30. Job opportunities are scarce, even for university graduates. The young are frustrated by the many restrictions that the regime imposes on dress, music, films, and intermixing between men and women. The educated among them yearn for a more open political environment. Women, through courageous struggle, have gained more rights then they enjoyed in the early years of the revolution, but they still chafe at dress restrictions, limited access to top jobs, and a tradition-bound clergy that, with its emphasis on woman as wives and mothers, still advocates for them what many regard as second-class status.

The vote for Khatami was not merely a protest vote against Nateq-Nuri and the ruling clerics; it was a vote for Khatami himself. The support for Khatami built up slowly, in a groundswell. My impression is that many Iranians decided to vote only in the closing days of the campaign. This would confirm that Khatami gained votes as individuals grew familiar with his ideas, gained confidence in his sincerity, and, finally, came to believe that he could make a difference. Endorsements not forthcoming early on multiplied in the later stages of the campaign. Women and the young played a major role in ensuring Khatami's victory. For example, Khatami gave a frank and full interview to the women's magazine Zanan, while Nateq-Nuri refused to answer its written questions.

The themes propounded by Khatami have become the common currency of public discussion since the election. If Soroush injected the idea of civil society into debates among the intelligentsia, Khatami introduced this concept to a much wider public, turning it into a subject for discussion among the political class and the public at large. Today it is difficult to pick up a political journal or newspaper and not run across [End Page 91] the idea of "civil society" being either attacked or defended. The Supreme Leader himself has tried to co-opt Khatami's campaign themes. Since the election, he has instructed the judiciary to root out official corruption, stressed the importance of addressing the problems of youth, and spoken repeatedly about women's issues. In October, a few days after a major Khatami speech on women's rights, a hundred thousand women were pulled together at a Tehran sports stadium to hear an address by Khamenei on the same issue.

Khatami does not want to overthrow the existing system. He wants to make it work better, but he wants to do so in interesting ways. For example, he notes that in the age of satellite dishes and the Internet, Iran cannot shut out the outside world, and he argues that the young can be "immunized" against the attractions of Western popular culture only through open debate and the free exchange of ideas. He knows that the Iranian Constitution enshrines the idea of religious rule, but seeks ways to make the principle of clerical supremacy compatible with individual rights and liberties.

"A Moment of Enthusiasm"?

The 1997 presidential election reflected both the possibilities of and the obstacles to meaningful politics in Iran. There exists a factional politics of elites that at times can offer real competition and choice and, through its own internal dynamics, engage a wider public in politics. There exists a press that, despite restrictions, can quickly seize opportunities to act as a watchdog and to engage in trenchant reporting and analysis. There exists, finally, a vibrant middle class eager to take part in politics but not quite sure how to do so. A confluence of factors brought these elements together to produce an election that captured the imagination of ordinary citizens and shook up the ruling establishment. Yet in some ways, public participation in the election resulted from what political scientist Leonard Binder has described in another context as "a moment of enthusiasm." The intriguing question is whether the moment will pass--whether Iran will continue to be a generally if unevenly repressive autocracy relieved by occasions when elite factionalism ushers in heady but evanescent periods of political openness; or whether Khatami (and others who think like him) will finds the means sustain this "moment," to strengthen the institutions of civil society, and to make possible a politics that is both meaningful and durable.

On the plus side, Khatami has come into office with a huge public mandate. He has used his clout to make important changes in the cabinet, including the removal of the notorious minister of intelligence, Reza Fallahian. His minister of interior has been replacing Ministry officials and provincial governors and, although nothing is certain, this could augur well for the conduct of future elections. His minister of culture has [End Page 92] already lifted many restrictions on the press and publishing. The debate in the Iranian press today is more open, and factional politics more intense, than at almost any time since the early days of the revolution. This is creating a better informed public, reviving the idea of politics as a choice among competing programs, and encouraging more groups to organize. Writers and journalists, for example, recently formed (or re-formed) a professional association.

On the other hand, factions opposed to the new president--in the Majlis, the clerical establishment, the security agencies, and elsewhere--will resist changes that they see as threats to their interests and livelihoods. Already there is evidence of attempts to frustrate, embarrass, and neutralize Khatami and his ministers. Even larger issues are at stake. Freer debate has reopened the issue of the Supreme Leader's authority, and at least one group has called for a limitation of his powers. Such talk has no doubt already alarmed Khamenei, and if it spreads from the fringes to the center of political debate, will reinforce his inclination to silence dissident voices. The 1998 elections for the Assembly of Experts, which selects the Supreme Leader, will be another flash point. These races will likely be hotly contested, tempting the hard-liners to crack down. The judiciary, the security forces, and the military establishment all remain under the control not of the president, but of the Supreme Leader. The institutions of civil society cannot continue to grow in strength without his support or at least his acquiescence. Some members of the clerical elite, including Khamenei himself, fear that Khatami's reforms could touch off a process that will threaten the regime itself. The security forces may find reason to crack down if the changes attempted by Khatami and the resistance to them severely fracture the ruling elite and lead to disorder in the streets.

Although such a return to repression cannot be ruled out, the experience of the recent elections, the freeing of the press, and the recent rise in political activity will make a new crackdown much more difficult to bring off. The ruling elite will have to pay a price in coin they prefer to avoid--possibly in bloodshed, certainly in an indifferent, disaffected, or even hostile public. To alienate the younger generation could prove particularly costly.

What seems to be missing in Iran are the institutions that will keep the larger public, and especially those members of it who are at the center of the political spectrum, durably engaged in politics. The political organizations of the formal clerical factions are too narrowly based to take on this task. Khatami has no political organization of his own, nor does he appear temperamentally inclined to do what it would take to build one. Such professional and civic associations as do exist are not organized to mobilize large groups of people from the political center. The danger is that those who voted for change and moderation in the elections, having no means to keep themselves engaged, will now sit [End Page 93] back and wait for "their" president to bring about the changes for which they voted. The disengagement of the center, of course, will raise the danger of polarization, with the radicals at the two ends of the political spectrum setting the tone of politics.

The principal task of Khatami and those who support his endeavor will be to create and strengthen political, professional, and civil associations among the broad political center and to keep them engaged in politics. This will be a hugely difficult undertaking, but a start has been made. If it is successfully followed through, one can envision an Iran in which Iranians will secure, on a more durable basis, the freedom to associate, to speak out on issues through an independent press, to hold government officials answerable to elected representatives, and to check the worst excesses of the security agencies. This would be a modest, yet astonishing, achievement.

Shaul Bakhash is Robinson Professor of Middle East History at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, and a member of the editorial board of the Journal of Democracy. He is the author of The Reign of the Ayatollahs: Iran and the Islamic Revolution (1990). During the 1960s and 1970s, he was an editor with Kayhan Newspapers in Tehran, and reported from Tehran for the Economist, the London Times, and the Financial Times.

Note

1. Musavi, who had led the cabinet during the harsh years of the war with Iraq, was a staunch advocate of state control over the economy, and hence highly unpopular with the bazaar merchants and their allies among the conservative clergy.

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