The only group, which consistently favored
Mousavi, was the university students and graduates, business
owners and the upper middle class; a highly privileged, vocal
and largely English speaking group with a monopoly on the
Western media. While they may be articulate, well dressed and
fluent in English, they were soundly out-voted in the secrecy of
the ballot box.
Iranian Elections: The
‘Stolen Elections’ Hoax
By James Petras
“Change for the poor means food and jobs,
not a relaxed dress code or mixed recreation…Politics in Iran is
a lot more about class war than religion.”
Financial Times
Editorial, June 15 2009
Introduction
There is hardly any election, in which the
White House has a significant stake, where the electoral defeat
of the pro-US candidate is not denounced as illegitimate by the
entire political and mass media elite. In the most recent
period, the White House and its camp followers cried foul
following the free (and monitored) elections in Venezuela and
Gaza, while joyously fabricating an ‘electoral success’ in
Lebanon despite the fact that the Hezbollah-led coalition
received over 53% of the vote.
The recently concluded, June 12, 2009
elections in Iran are a classic case: The incumbent
nationalist-populist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (MA) received
63.3% of the vote (or 24.5 million votes), while the leading
Western-backed liberal opposition candidate Hossein Mousavi (HM)
received 34.2% or (3.2 million votes). Iran’s presidential
election drew a record turnout of more than 80% of the
electorate, including an unprecedented overseas vote of 234,812,
in which HM won 111,792 to MA’s 78,300. The opposition led by HM
did not accept their defeat and organized a series of mass
demonstrations that turned violent, resulting in the burning and
destruction of automobiles, banks, public building and armed
confrontations with the police and other authorities.
Almost the entire spectrum of Western opinion
makers, including all the major electronic and print media, the
major liberal, radical, libertarian and conservative web-sites,
echoed the opposition’s claim of rampant election fraud.
Neo-conservatives, libertarian conservatives and Trotskyites
joined the Zionists in hailing the opposition protestors as the
advance guard of a democratic revolution. Democrats and
Republicans condemned the incumbent regime, refused to recognize
the result of the vote and praised the demonstrators’ efforts to
overturn the electoral outcome. The New York Times,
CNN, Washington Post, the Israeli Foreign Office and
the entire leadership of the Presidents of the Major American
Jewish Organizations called for harsher sanctions against Iran
and announced Obama’s proposed dialogue with Iran as ‘dead in
the water’.
The Electoral Fraud Hoax
Western leaders rejected the results because
they ‘knew’ that their reformist candidate could not
lose…For months they published daily interviews, editorials and
reports from the field ‘detailing’ the failures of
Ahmadinejad’s administration; they cited the support from
clerics, former officials, merchants in the bazaar and above all
women and young urbanites fluent in English, to prove that
Mousavi was headed for a landslide victory. A victory for
Mousavi was described as a victory for the ‘voices of
moderation’, at least the White House’s version of that vacuous
cliché. Prominent liberal academics deduced the vote count was
fraudulent because the opposition candidate, Mousavi, lost in
his own ethnic enclave among the Azeris. Other academics claimed
that the ‘youth vote’ – based on their interviews with upper and
middle-class university students from the neighborhoods of
Northern Tehran were overwhelmingly for the ‘reformist’
candidate.
What is astonishing about the West’s
universal condemnation of the electoral outcome as fraudulent is
that not a single shred of evidence in either written or
observational form has been presented either before or a week
after the vote count. During the entire electoral campaign, no
credible (or even dubious) charge of voter tampering was raised.
As long as the Western media believed their own propaganda of an
immanent victory for their candidate, the electoral process was
described as highly competitive, with heated public debates and
unprecedented levels of public activity and unhindered by public
proselytizing. The belief in a free and open election was so
strong that the Western leaders and mass media believed that
their favored candidate would win.
The Western media relied on its reporters
covering the mass demonstrations of opposition supporters,
ignoring and downplaying the huge turnout for Ahmadinejad. Worse
still, the Western media ignored the class composition of the
competing demonstrations – the fact that the incumbent candidate
was drawing his support from the far more numerous poor working
class, peasant, artisan and public employee sectors while the
bulk of the opposition demonstrators was drawn from the upper
and middle class students, business and professional class.
Moreover, most Western opinion leaders and
reporters based in Tehran extrapolated their projections from
their observations in the capital – few venture into the
provinces, small and medium size cities and villages where
Ahmadinejad has his mass base of support. Moreover the
opposition’s supporters were an activist minority of students
easily mobilized for street activities, while Ahmadinejad’s
support drew on the majority of working youth and household
women workers who would express their views at the ballot box
and had little time or inclination to engage in street politics.
A number of newspaper pundits, including
Gideon Rachman of the Financial Times, claim as evidence
of electoral fraud the fact that Ahmadinejad won 63% of the vote
in an Azeri-speaking province against his opponent, Mousavi, an
ethnic Azeri. The simplistic assumption is that ethnic identity
or belonging to a linguistic group is the only possible
explanation of voting behavior rather than other social or class
interests. A closer look at the voting pattern in the
East-Azerbaijan region of Iran reveals that Mousavi won only in
the city of Shabestar among the upper and the middle classes
(and only by a small margin), whereas he was soundly defeated in
the larger rural areas, where the re-distributive policies of
the Ahmadinejad government had helped the ethnic Azeris write
off debt, obtain cheap credits and easy loans for the farmers.
Mousavi did win in the West-Azerbaijan region, using his ethnic
ties to win over the urban voters. In the highly populated
Tehran province, Mousavi beat Ahmadinejad in the urban centers
of Tehran and Shemiranat by gaining the vote of the middle and
upper class districts, whereas he lost badly in the adjoining
working class suburbs, small towns and rural areas.
The careless and distorted emphasis on
‘ethnic voting’ cited by writers from the Financial Times
and New York Times to justify calling Ahmadinejad ‘s
victory a ‘stolen vote’ is matched by the media’s willful and
deliberate refusal to acknowledge a rigorous nationwide public
opinion poll conducted by two US experts just three weeks before
the vote, which showed Ahmadinejad leading by a more than 2 to 1
margin – even larger than his electoral victory on June 12. This
poll revealed that among ethnic Azeris, Ahmadinejad was favored
by a 2 to 1 margin over Mousavi, demonstrating how class
interests represented by one candidate can overcome the ethnic
identity of the other candidate (Washington Post June 15,
2009). The poll also demonstrated how class issues, within age
groups, were more influential in shaping political preferences
than ‘generational life style’. According to this poll, over
two-thirds of Iranian youth were too poor to have access to a
computer and the 18-24 year olds “comprised the strongest
voting bloc for Ahmadinejad of all groups” (Washington
Porst June 15, 2009). The only group, which consistently
favored Mousavi, was the university students and graduates,
business owners and the upper middle class. The ‘youth vote’,
which the Western media praised as ‘pro-reformist’, was a clear
minority of less than 30% but came from a highly privileged,
vocal and largely English speaking group with a monopoly on the
Western media. Their overwhelming presence in the Western news
reports created what has been referred to as the ‘North Tehran
Syndrome’, for the comfortable upper class enclave from which
many of these students come. While they may be articulate, well
dressed and fluent in English, they were soundly out-voted in
the secrecy of the ballot box.
In general, Ahmadinejad did very well in the
oil and chemical producing provinces. This may have be a
reflection of the oil workers’ opposition to the ‘reformist’
program, which included proposals to ‘privatize’ public
enterprises. Likewise, the incumbent did very well along the
border provinces because of his emphasis on strengthening
national security from US and Israeli threats in light of an
escalation of US-sponsored cross-border terrorist attacks from
Pakistan and Israeli-backed incursions from Iraqi Kurdistan,
which have killed scores of Iranian citizens. Sponsorship and
massive funding of the groups behind these attacks is an
official policy of the US from the Bush Administration, which
has not been repudiated by President Obama; in fact it has
escalated in the lead-up to the elections.
What Western commentators and their Iranian
protégés have ignored is the powerful impact which the
devastating US wars and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan had
on Iranian public opinion: Ahmadinejad’s strong position on
defense matters contrasted with the pro-Western and weak defense
posture of many of the campaign propagandists of the opposition.
The great majority of voters for the
incumbent probably felt that national security interests, the
integrity of the country and the social welfare system, with all
of its faults and excesses, could be better defended and
improved with Ahmadinejad than with upper-class technocrats
supported by Western-oriented privileged youth who prize
individual life styles over community values and solidarity.
The demography of voting reveals a real class
polarization pitting high income, free market oriented,
capitalist individualists against working class, low income,
community based supporters of a ‘moral economy’ in which usury
and profiteering are limited by religious precepts. The open
attacks by opposition economists of the government welfare
spending, easy credit and heavy subsidies of basic food staples
did little to ingratiate them with the majority of Iranians
benefiting from those programs. The state was seen as the
protector and benefactor of the poor workers against the
‘market’, which represented wealth, power, privilege and
corruption. The Opposition’s attack on the regime’s
‘intransigent’ foreign policy and positions ‘alienating’ the
West only resonated with the liberal university students and
import-export business groups. To many Iranians, the regime’s
military buildup was seen as having prevented a US or Israeli
attack.
The scale of the opposition’s electoral
deficit should tell us is how out of touch it is with its own
people’s vital concerns. It should remind them that by moving
closer to Western opinion, they removed themselves from the
everyday interests of security, housing, jobs and subsidized
food prices that make life tolerable for those living below the
middle class and outside the privileged gates of Tehran
University.
Amhadinejad’s electoral success, seen in
historical comparative perspective should not be a surprise. In
similar electoral contests between nationalist-populists against
pro-Western liberals, the populists have won. Past examples
include Peron in Argentina and, most recently, Chavez of
Venezuela, Evo Morales in Bolivia and even Lula da Silva in
Brazil, all of whom have demonstrated an ability to secure close
to or even greater than 60% of the vote in free elections. The
voting majorities in these countries prefer social welfare over
unrestrained markets, national security over alignments with
military empires.
The consequences of the electoral victory of
Ahmadinejad are open to debate. The US may conclude that
continuing to back a vocal, but badly defeated, minority has few
prospects for securing concessions on nuclear enrichment and an
abandonment of Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas. A
realistic approach would be to open a wide-ranging discussion
with Iran, and acknowledging, as Senator Kerry recently pointed
out, that enriching uranium is not an existential threat to
anyone. This approach would sharply differ from the approach of
American Zionists, embedded in the Obama regime, who follow
Israel’s lead of pushing for a preemptive war with Iran and use
the specious argument that no negotiations are possible with an
‘illegitimate’ government in Tehran which ‘stole an election’.
Recent events suggest that political leaders
in Europe, and even some in Washington, do not accept the
Zionist-mass media line of ‘stolen elections’. The White House
has not suspended its offer of negotiations with the newly
re-elected government but has focused rather on the repression
of the opposition protesters (and not the vote count). Likewise,
the 27 nation European Union expressed ‘serious concern about
violence’ and called for the “aspirations of the Iranian
people to be achieved through peaceful means and that freedom of
expression be respected” (Financial Times June 16,
2009 p.4). Except for Sarkozy of France, no EU leader has
questioned the outcome of the voting.
The wild card in the aftermath of the
elections is the Israeli response: Netanyahu has signaled to his
American Zionist followers that they should use the hoax of
‘electoral fraud’ to exert maximum pressure on the Obama
regime to end all plans to meet with the newly re-elected
Ahmadinejad regime.
Paradoxically, US commentators (left, right
and center) who bought into the electoral fraud hoax are
inadvertently providing Netanyahu and his American followers
with the arguments and fabrications: Where they see religious
wars, we see class wars; where they see electoral fraud, we see
imperial destabilization.
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