Iran’s President Mohammed Khatami has been returned to office with a landside majority. However, although the electorate are ready for reform the old guard of the right wing are obdurate in their opposition to progress or change, writes Ed Blanche.

President Mohammed Khatami’s stunning landslide victory in winning a second term in the 8 June elections has given the soft-spoken cleric a powerful mandate for his crusade for democratic reform in Iran — but he faces the prospect of an even greater power struggle with the deeply entrenched conservative hardliners who oppose him and mounting pressure for action from his own, mainly youthful, supporters who are increasingly impatient for change. Caught between these two opposing forces, Khatami is likely to have a rough ride over the next few years.

Khatami, who wept openly when he reluctantly announced his candidacy in May, beat even the most optimistic forecasts to romp home with 21.66 million of the 28.16 million votes, 76.9 per cent, surpassing the 70 per cent he polled when he was the surprise winner against conservative candidates in the 1997 election. His nearest rival this time, a former revolutionary prosecutor and labour minister Ahmad Tavakoli, came a poor second in a field of 10 candidates, with 15.6 per cent.

Conservatives perceive reforms as a threat to their grip on power

But on closer examination of the election statistics, the result is less clear cut: only 67 per cent of the 41.2 million Iranians eligible to vote went to the ballot box, compared to 83 per cent in 1997. A significant segment of the electorate, some 14 million people, did not vote.

While many of those were probably conservatives who expected Khatami to win, it must be assumed that there were also many pro-reform Iranians who had become disenchanted with the agonisingly slow pace of change during Khatami’s first term because of repeated setbacks inflicted by the hardliners and by Khatami’s own timidity in challenging the forces of conservativism more aggressively. Nonetheless, the turnout of voters was sufficiently impressive to negate all the talk of political apathy that was bandied about before the election and leaves conservatives with the choice of either coming to terms with Khatami’s reform movement or intensifying efforts to undermine and suppress it.

These forces perceive the reforms Khatami espouses as a threat to the grip on power they have held since the 1979 Islamic revolution and to the religious and revolutionary values they have clung to and imposed on the nation of 62 million throughout that turbulent time. There was never really any question of Khatami not winning; what was essential was to win convincingly. A large turnout was therefore crucial. The conservatives, conceding that they could not prevent his re-election, went out of their way during the election campaign to weaken his position, declaring that a second term would plunge Iran into chaos. They reasoned that if he was returned to office with a diminished majority he could be effectively marginalised. To avoid being humiliated as they were in 1997, none of the conservative candidates who ran had the official blessing of the mullahs. As it was, their strategy backfired.

There are fears of an intensification of the power struggle between Khatami and the hardliners

All through his first term, Khatami seemed to go out of his way to avoid a collision with the conservatives — not surprising since they control immense power through unelected institutions such as the armed forces and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, the regime’s military protectors; as well as the judiciary; the Council of Guardians, a constitutional body that vets all legislation to ensure it conforms to Islamic principles; broadcasting and the media; and a large segment of the economy — as much as 40 per cent — that has defied all efforts towards improving efficiency and accountability.

In the February 2000 elections, reformists won control of the 209-member Majlis, or Parliament, for the first time since the revolution, but often found its legislation blocked by the Council of Guardians. Khatami found that presidential power is highly limited under the constitution, with real power resting in the hands of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Every nine days, Khatami once complained, brought a new domestic crisis to his administration. Indeed, the reactionaries demonstrated their power during Khatami’s first term in an extraordinarily blatant manner, making a mockery of his promises of democracy and the rule of law by blocking a liberal press law, banning more than 40, mostly reformist, publications. Special courts threw numerous publishers and journalists into prison for criticising the regime and investigating the murder of dissident figures, (possibly more to curb further such investigations that some journalists alleged had reached into the highest levels of the political establishment) crushing a student revolt in July 1999 (the worst unrest in two decades), murdering opposition figures, even hauling several of Khatami’s ministers, advisers and confidants before the courts on the flimsiest of pretexts.

Democratic gains would reverbrate throughout the Islamic world and the Middle East

Indeed, in what many fear could be the shape of things to come, on 13 June, five days after the elections, two pro-reform newspapers, Hambastigi and Aftab-e Yazd, were placed under investigation following complaints by conservatives.

There are fears of an intensification of the power struggle that will decide the direction in which Iran will move in the years ahead. Major democratic gains by the reformists are something that would reverbrate throughout the Islamic world and in the Middle East. If Khatami hopes to satisfy the demands of his supporters, particularly an increasingly restive and largely unemployed younger generation that has little sympathy for the Islamic revolution, it is clear he will have to take off the gloves to stand up to the hardliners who have blocked him at every turn so far, if they are unwilling to compromise. Khatami understands that if he presses too hard he risks triggering events that could have catastrophic consequences for Iran, but he must also be aware that without taking risks during his second term his political crusade will falter, perhaps never to recover, and that the more militant followers of the pro-reform movement could then take matters into their own hands.

Former culture minister Ataollah Mohajerani, a Khatami associate who is seen by some as Khatami’s successor as leader of the reform movement and a possible presidential contender in 2005, expects Khatami’s re-election will inject a ?new intensity? into the reformist campaign. But, he cautioned, the conservatives are likely to redouble their efforts to blunt it rather than compromise.

?We should not have any unreasonable expectations,? said Mohajerani, who as Khatami’s culture minister spearheaded reforms in the press and the arts until conservative pressure forced him from office in December 2000. (Khatami suffered the same fate in 1992 when he was culture minister.) ?The people voted for Khatami. For the first time since the revolution, a president was re-elected with more votes than the first time. But we have to prepare our movement without provocation, calmly.?

He told another interviewer: ?I expect a short honeymoon. Maybe two months. Then they’ll use different language. But they’ll start repeating the same things they’ve done before.?

The hardliners still seem to be the dominant power in the conservative camp

Given the mood of frustration among the younger element within the reform movement that may be difficult. Nagmeh Sohrabi and Arang Keshavarzian, US doctoral candidates who observed the election campaign, noted that Khatami was frequently faulted at rallies ?for his silence during the attacks on student dormitories throughout the summer of 1999, and his inability to protect the nascent free press? while the reformists’ ?often timid agenda? was regularly challenged. At one Teheran rally, they said in a report for the Middle East Research and Information Project, a ?member of the Islamic Student Associations... asserted passionately that while the students support Khatami their support is not without criticism. While the past four years may have called for quiet leadership .. the reformist students now needed a leader who would move reform forward more aggressively. The crowd gave him a standing ovation.?

There appear to be divisions among the conservatives themselves now and Khatami’s electoral triumph may well widen them. According to some commentators the pragmatists among them are shifting towards the centre.

It was noticeable that some of Khatami’s presidential rivals espoused such issues as economic reform, privatisation and fighting rampant corruption (Khamenei launched yet another campaign to stamp out government graft before the election). Some even abandoned the fiery anti-Western rhetoric of the revolution to talk of the possibility of restoring relations with the United States. During the campaign, Hojatoleslam Taha Hashemi, a middle-ranking cleric who is close to Khamenei, suggested ?indirect and direct negotiations, not public negotiations? with Washington to revive relations severed in 1979.

To what extent such developments point to a significant change among the religious right that might be prepared to find an accomodation with Khatami at this critical juncture remains to be seen. There are those who believe that Khamenei, elected Ayatollah Khomeini’s successor for life by Iran’s leading clerics in 1989, has been deftly balancing the forces of change and of the status quo to avoid open confrontation. If that is so, Khatami’s new mandate may have put him in an increasingly awkward position. But for the time being the hardliners still seem to be the dominant power in the conservative camp.

Khatami’s aides say the policy priorities now are overhauling the judiciary, which is answerable to Khamenei, and economic reform, which if introduced would seriously weaken the establishment’s virtual monopoly on power and which the mullahs would resist mightily. A new cabinet, more radical than the one on which Khatami had to compromise in 1997, would be an indicator of which way Khatami intends to move.

What kind of cabinet emerges will not be known for some weeks, but in the meantime the reformist-dominated Majlis passed a bill on 30 May that for the first time defines political crime and requires public trial by jury for critics of the government, although it still has to be approved by the Council of Guardians. Then on 11 June, the Majlis re-elected one-time hardliner turned reformist Mehdi Karubi as speaker, with two other reformists, Mohammad Reza Khatami, the president’s brother, and Mohsen Amin as his deputies, indicating that the House may well be the main political arena in the months ahead.

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