Iran Invokes the West to Motivate Voters

Newsha Tavakolian for The New York Times — Members of a paramilitary group handed out leaflets recently in Tehran in support of a party that says that religion is more important than democracy.

By ROBERT F. WORTH
NYT

WASHINGTON — In the days leading up to Iran’s parliamentary elections on Friday, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and other top officials have been crisscrossing their country to issue stern warnings against a vast Western conspiracy, driven by panic, to undermine the vote. The official news media have amplified the campaign: “U.S. Dreads Iranians’ Turnout in Elections,” read one typical banner on Press TV, the state-run English-language vehicle.

That may come as a surprise outside Iran, where the elections are widely ignored, or dismissed as a contest among an ever-narrower circle of archconservatives. But this is no ordinary election. It is the first one to take place since the presidential election of 2009, which set off widespread accusations of fraud, vast street protests and a bloody crackdown lasting months that effectively eviscerated any viable opposition.

Now the Iranian authorities — who have long promoted voter turnout as an index of their government’s democratic legitimacy — must lure people back to the polls. It will not be easy: the leaders of the opposition movement have been placed under house arrest or jailed, along with hundreds of their leading supporters. The newspapers and other media organs that were allied with them have been shut down or silenced; more than three dozen prominent reporters have been jailed. The ideological spectrum of those running for Iran’s weak 290-member Parliament, known as the Majles, runs “from pitch black to dark gray,” said Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Even among many ordinary people without clear political affiliations, faith in the power of voting appears to have suffered badly, many analysts say.

So far, the authorities have tried to get out the vote in familiar jingoistic ways, portraying themselves as under siege by an arrogant West. War veterans are trotted out to urge voters to go to the polls, and the intelligence minister, Heydar Moslehi, has warned about insidious plots to keep people from voting. “A vibrant election will give the enemy a strong punch in the mouth,” Ayatollah Khamenei said Wednesday at a gathering in northwestern Iran, according to the state-run Mehr News Agency.

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