The “reformist,” “centrist” or “pro-Western” but definitely not a “safety valve” or a “moat of the system” as the so-called “Crown Prince of Iran” Reza Pahlavi, the oldest son of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran and his wife Farah Diba, calls him. Masoud Pezeshkian won the presidency of Iran fair and square. Moreover, together with his winning run-off elections against hardline conservative Saeed Jalili with 55% of the votes cast. The Iranian people showed that they still have faith that the “system” can be mended by participating in the elections with a record rate.
With a 39% turnout, the first round of the election saw the lowest participation for a presidential election in the Islamic Republic's history. Over 10 points higher than the previous record in the 2021 election, this time 55% of the voters went to the polls. The pundits opined that Iranians’ disenchantment is detectable in the waning enthusiasm as the diminishing turnout suggests that the republic's internal legitimacy faltered a long time ago.
“Low voting rates mean that the people are happy with what they have got!”
When I heard this statement in my “Introduction to Political Science” class, I was astonished. All my childhood, the family and neighbor elders used to rush to the poll stations, proudly saying it was a national duty, and goading us children to go with them so that it would inculcate us with respect for that national call. Those visits to the nearest elementary school, where the ballot boxes would usually be, were a family affair to celebrate the... “democracy.” Well, I don’t know exactly if it was “democracy” they had in mind as the subject of that celebration; but more on that later.
If something is a national duty, you’d do it happily. Now, our political science teacher was telling us that, according to the concept of “political support” hypothesized by professor David Easton, if you are happy with the government services, satisfied with the prices on the market or the street cleanliness of your municipality, etc., in other words, if you don’t feel that you need to register your political support with “The System,” you may (probably would) not go and vote.
According to Easton’s theory, the high rates of voting might (and usually do) mean that the people had some “discomfort and complaints” about the political and/or administrative affairs, and they simply wanted to have a “change.”
Professor Easton had started his teaching job at Harvard, and he used to drop by when he was going home to Canada from Chicago University where he was teaching at that time and say “Hi” to Samuel Huntington; thus giving us mortals the opportunity to see the inventor of the definition of “the politics” in person. Easton was at the forefront of both the behavioralist and post-behavioralist revolutions in political science during those years; he redefined “politics” (after Aristotle) as the authoritative allocation of values for society. Accordingly, if you are happy with the current state of allocations of values (material and otherwise: altruistic, humanistic, personal, divine or affective) then why would you upset the applecart?
You would go and vote to change those people authorized to allocate societal values to your liking. You would hope the government would allocate funds the way it suits your interests, tastes or wishes. Again, it is not only the money we are talking about; it is about anything that the government has the authority to coerce on society at large. It would include the new planning of transportation in the country, price control in the “free” market, new curriculum for the school.
When an Iranian fellow at Huntington’s institute at Harvard asked the theorist himself, what if the voter turnout is constantly low despite the fact that people are not happy with the governance? Professor Easton responded by asking how he would know that the people were not happy. Our Iranian fellow introduced himself, saying “I am from Tehran, and I know for the last decade people are not happy with the Revolution, including even those who supported the overthrow of Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. They helped to end the Iranian monarchy, but they did not like the theocracy that replaced it.”
When this conversation happened, the Iranian Islamic Revolution was almost 10 years old and the multiparty system it allowed had flourished to almost 40 political parties. Yet, the presidential system it created was like no other system with its “supreme leader” ("Rahbar-e Moazam-e Iran") and his “Council of Guardians” ("Shoura-ye Negahban"); all the candidates the political parties put forward and the independents were subject to the approval of the Supreme Leader and his council. My Iranian fellow said, “Only those of their ilk would be approved” and parliament would be a gathering of like-minded mullahs with different degrees of conservatism: “Even the candidates of the progressive parties are Islamic scholars!” So he said, “People have no hope, no expectations from the political system; and, therefore, they are not even bothering to vote!”
I don’t exactly remember how professor Easton responded, but I recall he explained in detail what a “failed state” is, and how countries could be restructured after hitting the bottom of internal legitimacy. But, years later, in several articles, he re-assessed his 1974 article titled “A Re-Assessment of the Concept of Political Support”; he questioned his own notion of “political support,” and he recognized that over the long run, the inability of political authorities to satisfy popular demands would not only decrease specific support but also erode people’s support for the regime.
Then what happens? The better question should be "What happens when the people’s support for the regime erodes totally?” How do we know how much indifference of people would indicate that the country is on the brink of being a “failed state”?
It is empirically difficult to answer these questions. But the isolation of Iran has been reflected in some media reports that some officials in Tehran are “gloating satisfaction” that Joe Biden's debate performance quashed his reelection chances in November. They can't be gleeful about the possibility of Trump’s coming to the White House again; it must be the expectation of chaos, instability and political anarchy in the U.S.
Haaretz’s Alon Pinkas says the Iranian mullahs “love the smell of American weakness in the morning.”
Well, in Türkiye and Iran we all call coffee “kahve/qahwa” and the Persian coffee – I hear from my friends – is not as marvelous as Turkish coffee – who sip their Turkish coffee when observing the elections in the field. Our Persian friends should wake up and smell their “qahwa” because of David Easton’s theory “that if members of a polity do not develop sufficient political awareness to connect their wants and demands with political outputs, they turn to their ethnic connections.”
Remember the first candidate of the people who voted most in the first round was a person known by his ethnicity; and the winner is the same person Turkish, Azerbaijani and Kurdish extract. They also should remember that the voter turnout was at a record high in the last decade.
In countries where people express their political support based on the ethnicity of the candidates, their support of the overall system is about to fail and disintegrate regardless of what happens in the United States in November.
Masoud Pezeshkian’s victory is a wake-up call. Should the “supreme leader” and his mullahs at the “Council of Guardians” deem not to heed this call and allow him to recreate the connection between the system and people’s wants and wishes, their so-called Islamic Republic will be a historical relic.
