Low Turnout in Controversial Iran Vote Seen as Blow to Conservatives

Iranians voted Friday for the assembly that chooses and supervises the country’s supreme leader, but the turnout appeared low in what would be a setback for conservatives who had been urging massive participation as a religious and patriotic duty.

Apathy has surrounded the vote for the Assembly of Experts ever since most of the would-be candidates who supported the moderate reforms of President Mohammad Khatami were barred from the ballot.

Khatami urged the nation to join him in voting, even though he voiced dismay with the choices that Iranians were presented with on election day.

“Definitely, there could have been more qualified people than were allowed, but nonetheless we still have a chance to choose our favored candidates,” the president said after voting near his home.

The experts’ assembly is a relatively obscure body, but voting for its 86 members is the only way that ordinary Iranians can influence the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who holds almost unlimited powers.

In many ways, the controversy surrounding this year’s election goes to the heart of the political struggle taking place in Iran between moderates or reformers supporting Khatami and the conservatives behind Khamenei.

Scant turnout among the 39 million eligible voters would be interpreted by many as a rebuke to the hard-line Khamenei, especially compared with the public’s huge enthusiasm for Khatami.

Conservatives on the Council of Guardians, the body that oversees elections, saw to it that all but about 30 of the 161 candidates on the ballot were supporters of Khamenei’s conservative policies.

With most supporters of Khatami therefore off the ballot, there was little in the way of a direct contest in the election, so attention shifted instead to how many Iranians would even bother to show up at the polls.

Hoping to maximize the turnout, the Council of Guardians twice extended voting hours for a total of three hours Friday. Meanwhile, prayer leaders across the country hectored people to go to the polls.

Nevertheless, according to anecdotal evidence from journalists and other witnesses, polling stations appeared largely empty.

State-controlled media, however, portrayed the turnout as adequate, and the Council of Guardians went so far as to pronounce it “massive,” according to the IRNA, the Islamic Republic News Agency.

Since Khatami surged to the presidency with a 70% landslide in May 1997 on a platform urging greater freedom and more normal contacts between the country and the rest of the world, many inside Iran have begun to question the validity of the country’s most important powers being under the control of a cleric who is not directly elected.

Conservatives respond that a popular mandate is not required for the supreme leader, because he governs not on the basis of popularity but on his superior knowledge and understanding of the will of God as manifested in the Koran and in Islamic law.

Under Iran’s constitution, the Assembly of Experts, which serves an eight-year term, is empowered to tell the leader if he has gone astray according to Islamic law, and in extreme cases to remove him. When the leader dies or is removed, it votes for an individual or a panel of religious leaders to replace him. In practice, however, the council meets only once a year and has never been known to contradict the leader.

Each member of the Assembly of Experts is supposed to be a mujtahid, someone with recognized mastery of Islamic law and jurisprudence. But for the first time this year, some candidates were required to sit for examinations to prove their qualifications.

In the end, the Council of Guardians disqualified 229 of the 396 people who applied because they purportedly did not live up to its standards. Most of those rejected were reformers close to Khatami. Some candidates later dropped out.