Rouhani's re-election as Iran president does not signal a win for democracy
Hassan Rouhani was re-elected last Friday for a second round of four years' presidency in Iran.
Rohani’s electoral victory was significant (57 per cent chose him), and welcomed with joy and relief by a majority of the 41 million Iranians who went to vote.
In the days following his re-election, the streets of Tehran were filled with a vibrant crowd celebrating to the sound of Iranian pop music. Just as in 2013, while state authorities are eager to show a democratic face to the world through highly attended and well organised elections, people rush to take over the streets and subvert their well planned order via dance, music and women’s hair floating out of car windows…
The last four years have not witnessed many changes or growth in civil society initiatives, or social and political resistance to state power. But the electoral campaign launched a moment of intense political participation that culminated in highly attended elections, and bursts of joy on the streets of Tehran.
Twitter and Facebook posts celebrated the fact that more than 70 per cent of Iranians went to vote - way more than the 58 per cent who voted in the US election - as a sign of a vibrant democracy.
If so many Iranians queued to vote, while well established democracies struggle with abstention, it is not because political life in Iran is more participative, more popular and more legitimate to the people. It is because of a well established system that reinvents the terms of consent and constraint.
On the one hand, the elections are not democratic since the choice and spectrum are extremely narrow and pre-defined. The candidates must be approved by an "Assembly of experts" in line with the Supreme Leader’s views: only careful insiders make it as candidates.
On the other, presidential elections are moments of exception that aim entirely towards high participation, which would reaffirm the Republican dimension in the Islamic Republic and reassert the State’s legitimacy.
An unusual air of freedom reigns in TV debates between candidates and in the streets, attracting the progressives and youth in colourful meetings. Well organised networks of mosques and the bassidj mobilise the political clientele of conservative candidates - state employees and working-class beneficiaries of different "foundations" (bonyaad).
And since 2005, when massive abstention resulted in the unexpected victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the fear of the worst is a driving force to drag in those who don’t find they have a choice.
This year again, the former argument was personified through Rouhani’s challenger, Ebrahim Raisi. Like in the case of Donald Trump in the US or Le Pen in France, many Iranians first and foremost voted against Raisi.
This cleric, who never holds an office or elected position, declared in a TV debate that he had much on-the-ground experience. "Sure he does," said undercover jokes fusing in the social media. "But there’s no one left to testify about it!"
These referred to Raisi’s past as a prosecutor in revolutionary courts in the 1980s, when he sentenced to death thousands of political opponents - reframed as "enemies" at a time of bloody war with Iraq.
State violence in the consolidation years of the Islamic Republic culminated in 1988 with the mass killing of a few thousands of political opponents who were serving their prison sentences.
Ordered by Khomeini, the massacre was carried on the ground by a three-person committee flying from town to town to establish the lists and supervise the killings. Raisi was one of the three.
If his past was denounced on social media and in Iranian diasporas abroad, it was not mentioned in the electoral debate or international media coverage. But another one of the three was Pourmohammadi - Rouhani’s minister of justice during 2013-17.
So the political career of perpetrators goes well beyond binary oppositions between "conservatives" and "moderates" and is structural to the regime. Raisi’s conservative candidacy, openly backed by the Supreme Leader, illustrates once more how the system not only denies state crimes that lie at the foundations of today’s homogeneous political life, but also reward their authors with higher positions.
This comes in a double climate. On the one hand, while years of post-revolutionary violence have been totally silenced for decades, they are now captured by state propaganda (through movies, museums, etc) and a narrative of civil war. On the other hand, the evocation of state violence exposes to intimidations and repression.
Silence mostly prevails around what can be named a "public secret". Collective silence cements the architecture of denial and amnesia since more than 70 per cent of Iranians are below 30 years of age - they didn’t experience the years of extreme violence, and just never heard about it.
All these elements gather to explain why the impressive crime record of a minister of justice of a moderate government or a conservative candidate seem irrelevant to public debate. The lack of reaction, indignation, and debate after Pourmohammadi’s appointment as minister of justice showed somehow that state violence was not a sensitive issue.
It traced a threshold of acceptability, paving the way for Raisi’s candidacy. This is one example of how moral and emotional mappings imposed by the state, and accepted by the Iranian public in a pragmatic approach to change, have been internalised. And the frontiers between constraint and consent are blurred - even to the actors themselves.
In sum, people’s full involvement in the presidential elections is experienced, sometimes passionately, as a form of resistance within the range of available actions. But this mobilisation serves the system as a whole.
Participation is engineered in order to maintain the regime's legitimacy, which stands on a discourse of Republican sovereignty. Within this framework, however, there seems to be room for political struggles, be it within the political cast and factions, or between civil society and the state.
In the former situation, a power relation needs to be established by taking the lead in reframing the public debate and opening the space between obedience and adhesion. The problem with today’s pragmatic approach is the constant slippage from a low-intensity resistance that works for change in the long run, and adhesion.
This is why confronting the regime on the foundations of its legitimacy seems necessary - be it by reminding the undemocratic frame of the elections or the history of foundational violence. But Iranian civil society seems often to have become the very guardian of the red lines imposed on it.