Voting closed in Iran and calls for a resistance vote are ignored

Voting has closed for Iran's legislative elections, which analysts say could see a record low turnout as Iranians face a struggling economy, growing political distrust and a suppressed protest movement.

The polls opened at 8am on Friday (1st) and closed at midnight on Saturday (2nd), local time, according to state news agencies. Vote counting is underway “to send them to the Iranian Interior Ministry’s Election Commission,” the semi-official Tasnim news agency reported.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who called on citizens to vote as an act of resistance against the nation's enemies, voted in Tehran, according to live video broadcast by state media.

Iran was struggling to increase turnout ahead of the elections, but calls for voters to go to the polls may be falling on deaf ears.

Around 15,000 candidates are running in the parliamentary elections for 290 seats and 144 are running for the 88 seats in the Assembly of Experts, which has the power to appoint the Supreme Leader, the highest political authority in Iran.

Khamenei is over 84 years old and therefore this new Assembly will select his successor if he dies during the body's eight-year term.

However, voter turnout is expected to be low, with candidates opposing the current hardline government disqualified amid a widespread crackdown on dissent, which rights groups say has only intensified following the protest movement. 2022 triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini who was in police custody.

“No, I won’t vote,” a 23-year-old Iranian woman told CNN , coming from Tehran. “They (the elections) take place as a spectacle and propaganda and, in my opinion, participating in such events is being an accomplice and helping in their political propaganda,” she said, asking to be quoted anonymously for fear of reprisals from authorities.

However, authorities are eager to get people to the polls, trying to inspire a sense of duty and resilience among Iranians amid Israel's war in Gaza.

Khamenei this month called on Iranians to attend polling stations, writing on Platform X that “elections are the main pillar of the Islamic Republic.” He warned Iranians that their enemy would try to discourage them from voting and therefore voting was a responsibility and a form of resistance.

“Everyone should note that fulfilling these duties and responsibilities is an act of jihad in confronting the enemy, because they do not want these duties to be fulfilled,” Khamenei was quoted as saying in the Tehran Times.

Other officials directly cited the war in Gaza to rally voters ahead of election day. In a speech this month, Hamidreza Moghadamfar, an advisor to the IRGC commander-in-chief, said that “the biggest supporters of the massacre of tens of thousands of women and children in Gaza are the same ones who oppose the vote of the people of Iran and are the enemies of democracy.”

The authorities' rhetoric is “a desperate attempt to get people to participate,” said Alex Vatanka, founding director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute in Washington, D.C., adding that this is “typical” of Khamenei's time.

Foad Izadi, associate professor at Tehran University's Faculty of World Studies, said it is not difficult to encourage voting by calling for national unity against the US and Israel, as most Iranians are outraged by the images of gushing bloodshed. of the Israel-Hamas war.

“A good percentage of these people, the people who don't like the current government of Iran, when they hear an American government official talking about human rights in Iran, they don't accept (it),” Izadi said, adding that they see the West as having lost the right to talk about human rights after letting the carnage in Gaza go on for months.

Israel's war in the enclave, although strongly opposed by many Iranians, may, however, not sufficiently attract all voters to the polling stations.

“Government incitements, in any form, to vote will not influence the people, even if we include the Israel-Gaza war,” the 23-year-old woman told CNN . She added that since the government has repeatedly used the Gaza war “for its own propaganda,” those who oppose the government but support the Palestinians “prefer to remain silent on the issue” to avoid being seen as supporting the agenda. of the authorities.

“Passivity is itself a choice”

More than 61 million of Iran's 87 million people will be able to vote next month, according to Iran's Election Supervisory Board. While few opinion polls have been released publicly ahead of this year's elections, the results of those that have been made public predict a record low turnout.

In a December interview with Iranian state news agency ISNA, Hassan Moslemi Naeini, head of the state-run Academic Center for Education, Culture and Research, said that only 27.9 percent of respondents to his latest survey said they would “definitely participate.” in the elections.” Meanwhile, 36% said they “will not participate in the elections at all”.

Voter turnout has been declining in Iran, largely due to declining trust in the regime, some experts say. While older Iranian generations gave the idea of ​​“reform through the ballot box” a chance, said Vatanka of the Middle East Institute, Iranians today see elections as happening “just to happen.”

Iran's last presidential elections, in 2021, which brought hard-liner Ebrahim Raisi to power, recorded a turnout of 48.8%, down from 85% in 2009.

This year's legislative elections are “expected to have the lowest turnout in the 45-year history of the Islamic Republic,” said Holly Dagres, a nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council, attributing this to “systemic corruption, mismanagement and repression” by the state and “how illegitimate the clerical establishment is in the eyes of the people of Iran.”

“This passivity is itself a choice and a vote of dissatisfaction with the ruling regime,” said another young woman in Tehran, adding that the regime has stripped the words “election” and “republic” of their true meaning.

Jamshid Jamshidi, a PhD candidate at the University of Oxford who researches local politics in Iran, notes, however, that participation can look different outside of urban centers. In smaller cities and towns, higher levels of voter turnout are expected, he told CNN .

This week's elections come more than a year after mass protests rocked the country in 2022 in opposition to the hijab law and other social issues. The movement was suppressed by authorities and Iran's parliament passed draconian new legislation that imposes much harsher penalties on women who violate hijab rules.

A group of UN experts said in September that Iran “could have learned important lessons from the tragic death of Jina Mahsa Amini” – the 22-year-old woman who died in 2022 after being detained by the regime's infamous morality police, allegedly for not respecting the country's conservative dress code.

“But the response to demonstrations that have led to the deaths of hundreds of protesters since September 2022 shows that authorities have chosen not to do so,” the UN experts said.

International observers have also repeatedly criticized Iran for holding elections that are neither free nor fair, marked by a vetting process that restricts the types of candidates allowed to run.

This year, Iran's Guardian Council – a powerful 12-member council tasked with overseeing elections and legislation – disqualified more than 12,000 candidates from running for parliamentary seats and banned moderate former President Hassan Rouhani from running for the Assembly of Experts. .

Authorities have also made it clear that boycotts will not be tolerated. A Norway-based group focused on Kurdish rights, the Hengaw Organization for Human Rights, reported this month that a Kurdish resident in Sanandaj province was arrested by Iranian security forces after calling for an election boycott.

His arrest came after he released a video saying: “The very act of voting amounts to endorsing all malpractices and corruption,” Hengaw said.

“We’re not getting anywhere”

Paralyzed by Western sanctions since 1979, the Islamic Republic remains isolated from much of the world. Inflation is still high, exceeding 32% in 2024, with millions of people below the poverty line.

Adding to the economic peril of the Iranians are the waves of attacks exchanged between the US and Tehran-backed regional militias.

Following the drone attack in Jordan that killed three US Army soldiers and injured more than 30 other military personnel, the Iranian currency fell from almost 500,000 rials against the US dollar in early January to more than 580,000 in January 29th. Iranian media attributed the sharp drop in the value of the rial to escalating regional conflicts.

“Three Americans were killed yesterday. Today, 80 million Iranians have become poorer,” wrote Iranian businessman Pedram Soltani on X.

A 27-year-old Iranian man, who also asked to remain anonymous, cited economic difficulties when asked why he would not vote on March 1.

“The reason is the strong inflation that exists,” he told CNN . “No matter how hard we work, from morning to night, in two places, two shifts, we don’t get anywhere.”