Reading the ballot in Tehran

More than 50 million Iranians are invited to vote today in elections that Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Guide of the Islamic Republic, has described as “fixing the frontiers” with the American Great Satan. At stake are 290 seats in the Majlis, the make-believe Parliament set up by the mullahs after they seized power in 1979… Khamenei is right in presenting the election as an indirect referendum on President Ahmadinejad’s dangerous foreign policy. The issue is whether the mullahs will lose yet more control to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and, if so, which faction of the guards will emerge triumphant, the radicals or the realists.

The IRGC is a parallel army of more than 250,000 men, created by the Ayatollah Khomeini… it has emerged as the backbone of the ruling Establishment — especially, since it controls more than 500 companies with interests in everything from oil to tourism… A win by the most radical faction, which is close to President Ahmadinejad, would postpone any rapprochement with the US, as well as any hopes of liberalisation at home, for at least another four years. But a win by the more pragmatic faction, former and active IRGC officers who have amassed great personal wealth, could herald an easing of tension with the West and, perhaps, less repressive methods at home…

Many prominent Iranians, among them people who had worked for the Khomeinist regime for years, have called for a boycott of the polls. Many others wonder what is the point of the exercise. But holding elections, even under these peculiar circumstances, is a perverse way of acknowledging the people as the ultimate source of power, a kind of tribute that vice pays to virtue. The elections to the Majlis, however circumscribed, give a sense of the shift of power within Iran and enable the ruling Establishment to sort out its internal rivalries without bloodshed.

Excerpted from Amir Taheri’s ‘Iran’s choice: a man in a military cap or a man in a military cap’ in The Times, London, March 14