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iran protests
Iranian Snap Elections Head to Runoff After Reformist Pezeshkian Takes Narrow Lead
A total of 24,735,185 people voted, representing a turnout of around 40%—the lowest turnout in an Iranian election since the 1979 revolution.
Jun 29, 2024
Reformist legislator Masoud Pezeshkian and conservative former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili will face off in a second round of voting after neither candidate secured a majority of the votes in Iran's election Friday.
Surprise elections in Iran were called after conservative President Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash on May 19, opening what one expert called a "void in the Islamic Republic's leadership."
"None of the candidates could garner the absolute majority of the votes, therefore, the first and second contenders who got the most votes will be referred to the Guardian Council," Interior Ministry spokesperson Mohsen Eslami announced on Saturday.
"Pezeshkian appears to have done well enough to turn out a core base of support that gives him a plausible path to victory, but he will likely need to secure support from Iranians who opted to stay home yesterday in order to triumph."
Pezeshkian and Jalili will now advance to the runoff election on July 5.
After Friday's voting, Pezeshkian took a slight lead with 10.45 million votes over Jalili's 9.47 million, according to an initial tally reported by The Guardian. Both of them edged out conservative parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf with 3.38 million votes and former Justice Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi with 206,000.
A total of 24,735,185 people voted, representing a turnout of around 40%. That is the lowest turnout in an Iranian election since the 1979 revolution, according to Middle East Eye.
"This demonstrates that a majority of the Iranian public remains disaffected from participation in the Islamic Republic's restricted elections, which are neither free nor fair," the National Iranian American Council (NIAC) wrote in a statement on Saturday. "The Iranian people have suffered manifold outrages from their government and circumstances, including the brutal crackdown on popular protests in 2022 and earlier and the failure of past moderate and reformist figures to deliver lasting change."
"As a result," NIAC continued, "a majority appear to have concluded for now that they would rather stay home than risk legitimizing a government they do not believe in. The inclusion of a reformist on the ticket in Masoud Pezeshkian may have boosted turnout in some quarters, but did little overall to arrest the slide in turnout in the first round."
Reform leader Abbas Akhoundi said: "About 60% of voters did not participate in the elections. Their message was clear. They object to the institutionalized discrimination in the existing governance and do not accept that they are second-class citizens and that a minority impose their will on the majority of Iranian society as first-class citizens."
The outcome on July 5 could depend on whether or not turnout increases.
NIAC observed that Pezeshkian's lead was surprising, given that low-turnout elections usually favor more conservative candidates.
"Typically, reformists have only triumphed when turnout reaches near record highs with a vast majority of public participation," the group wrote. "Pezeshkian appears to have done well enough to turn out a core base of support that gives him a plausible path to victory, but he will likely need to secure support from Iranians who opted to stay home yesterday in order to triumph."
Because power in Iran is ultimately held by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the winner of the presidential election is unlikely to substantially shift policies such as Iran's nuclear program or its support for militant groups in the Middle East, according to Reuters.
However, NIAC said the difference between the two candidates was "about as wide a difference as the Islamic Republic's restricted elections would allow."
Pezeshkian, a former health minister who represents Tabriz in Parliament, advocates for economic and social reform. He expressed regret over the death of Mahsa Amini after she was arrested for allegedly wearing her hijab incorrectly—an event that sparked nationwide protests in 2022—and also criticized the Raisi government for lack of transparency during the protests.
"We will respect the hijab law, but there should never be any intrusive or inhumane behavior toward women," Pezeshkian said after voting on Friday.
In foreign policy, he supports direct diplomacy with the U.S. and has expressed interest in renegotiating the 2015 Iran nuclear deal or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).
Jalili, who represents Khamenei on the Supreme National Security Council, supports even stricter hijab laws, advocates for internet restrictions, and opposes the JCPOA or any negotiations with Western countries.
Because Pezeshkian was the only reformist in the first round of elections, he may struggle in a second round unless turnout increases, as supporters of the other conservative candidates would vote for Jalili, according to The Guardian.
However, a reformist newspaper editor told the Middle East Eye that many people who had sat out the first round of elections may vote in the second round to prevent a win by Jalili. The editor also predicted that many people who voted for Ghalibaf in the first round would back Pezeshkian in the second.
"At least 40% of his supporters, who are moderate and pragmatic conservatives, would vote for Pezeshkian as they fear Jalili's domestic policies and dead-end foreign policy," the editor said.
Ahead of the election, Trita Parsi of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft predicted that voters would ultimately decide based on a desire to improve "their increasingly dire economic situation in the medium term."
"They are looking for the candidate who will most likely be able to reduce the price of meat," Parsi wrote.
He did predict the winner could make a difference in Iran-U.S. relations, but only up to a point.
"Expectations for an opening between the U.S. and Iran should be kept low, even if Pezeshkian wins," Parsi concluded. "The problems between the U.S. and Iran are deeper today than they were in 2013, the trust gap is wider, reversing Iran's nuclear advances is going to be more difficult and politically more costly. On top of all that, Iran has more options in today's increasingly multipolar world."
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How Iranian Women and Girls Use Powerful Images to Protest Oppression
Images of Iranian women engaged in defiant acts make their daily oppression visible.
Dec 24, 2022
Images of unveiled Iranian women and adolescent girls standing atop police cars or flipping off the ayatollah’s picture have become signature demonstrations of dissent in the past few months of protest in Iran.
In fact, among the Iranian protest photos selected for inclusion in Time magazine’s list of the “Top 100 Photos of 2022” are one of women running from military police brigades and another of an unveiled woman standing on a car with hands raised.
As a scholar studying the use of images in political movements, I find Iranian protest photos powerful and engaging because they play on several elements of defiance. They draw on a longer history of Iranian women taking and sharing photos and videos of actions considered illegal, such as singing and dancing to protest gender oppression.
Pictures in past Iranian movements
Iranian women did not stage mass public demonstrations against restrictions on their freedoms for nearly three decades following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, when protests against compulsory hijab laws were brutally crushed by the Islamic regime.
In the 2009 Iranian Green Movement against election fraud, however, women played a major role. Images of one young female protester, Neda Agha-Soltan, who was fatally shot by security forces during the protest, went viral, catalyzing millions of Iranians to join the protests.
In subsequent protests, visuals have been at the heart of women’s efforts to mobilize against the Islamic Republic. In 2014, women began recording themselves walking, cycling, dancing and singing in public unveiled, under the banner of the “My Stealthy Freedom” movement. Started by Masih Alinejad, an Iranian-born journalist based in New York, the movement protested the forced wearing of the hijab and other restrictive laws by showing women breaking them.
Walking in busy city streets unveiled, riding a bike in parks where such activities are banned for women and joining dance circles in town squares were among the ways in which Iranian women protested oppressive laws and practices.
Four years later, what came to be known as the “Girls of Revolution Street,” protests started with one woman, Vida Movahed, standing atop a utility box on Tehran’s Revolution Street to wave her headscarf on a stick like a flag. Soon, others joined Movahed by repeating her action in other public spaces in Iran.
Images showing dozens of people protesting mandatory veiling in this way were widely shared on social media and later picked up by global news networks, bringing international attention to women’s resistance efforts in Iran.
\u201cIt was the quietest protest Iran has ever witnessed. Vida Movahed, a 31-year-old mother of a toddler, stood atop a large utility box and removed the hijab that all women are required to wear by law: https://t.co/O93RGaBDOe\u201d— The New Yorker (@The New Yorker) 1518348125
The use of images by protesters has been a central practice of resistance in other protests around the world as well. During the Arab Spring, a series of protests against the ruling regimes that spread across the Middle East and North Africa in the early 2010s, images played an important role in mobilizing people into joining the movement.
A photo of a woman dragged by government forces in the streets of Egypt with her body exposed persuaded many to protest against what was a clear example of state violence in the Egyptian uprising. These images challenged the regime interpretations of protesters as “troublemakers” and helped bypass the state-controlled news networks to show the world what was happening on the ground.
\u201cPic #KhaledSaid on the right and other martyrs on the left #Alex #Jan25\u201d— Mona Eltahawy (@Mona Eltahawy) 1327674773
What such resistance means
Iranian women have been protesting the Islamic Republic’s sexist policies and showing the world what freedom and gender identity mean to them through their bodily expressions.
Images of women freely riding a bike or sitting with a member of the opposite sex while unveiled are ways of protesting through the everyday acts that women are barred from under the Islamic Republic. Through their widespread participation in these actions, women have shown a solidarity.
As it is difficult for the Islamic Republic to suppress this kind of protest, it often responds by arresting key activists who can be identified and imprisoning them for several years. In 2019, one activist associated with this form of protest, Yasaman Aryani, was sentenced to a 16-year jail term after a video surfaced of her handing out flowers in the Tehran metro unveiled.
Images of Iranian women engaged in defiant acts make their daily oppression visible. Scholar Mona Lilja describes these protests in terms of “resisting bodies” that speak in ways that are not always apparent at the outset of a demonstration or public act of defiance. Emotions, symbolic actions and women’s engagements with the spaces in which they protest combine to form the meaning of resistance we associate with these pictures.
Today’s protest pictures build on past resistance efforts and build on a tradition of resisting the Iranian government.
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