Borzou Daragahi writes:

Just five years ago, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei exhorted Iranians to turn up at the polls, even calling on those citizens who despised him to vote for the sake of Iran.

“Everyone should participate in the elections,” he said ahead of the 2016 parliament and assembly of experts elections. “Even those who do not accept the ruling system should participate for the sake of the country.”

But his pleas for turnout ahead of the looming June presidential vote have become decidedly less vocal and enthusiastic. After last year’s parliamentary election debacle, in which there was a record-low official turnout of 42 percent—the lowest since the 1979 revolution—Khamenei likely doesn’t want to put his credibility on the line by allowing it to appear that Iranians are simply ignoring him. A paltry 43 percent of the public has said that they would participate in the upcoming vote, according to a poll conducted by the state-owned Iranian Students Polling Agency.

The decision of the Guardian Council, a vetting body, to exclude moderate or reformist heavyweights, such as former parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani or Mostafa Tajzadeh, from running also suggests a regime elite taking a different view of elections.

“There is certainly some degree of nervousness among the establishment,” said Ali Fathollah-Nejadi, an Iran watcher at the Afro-Middle East Centre and author of Iran in an Emerging New World Order. “It may be an odd mix between a sense of hubris, given their domestic opponents’ historical weakness, and the fear that Ali Larijani’s late blitz media entry into the race could have enabled a popular mobilization.”

Khamenei for years has been agitating to find what he describes as a new generation of young and pious “revolutionaries”—that is, hardline supporters of Islamic theocracy—to take the helm of the country’s institutions. That aim—more than acceding to the Iranian people’s preferences and boosting the popular legitimacy of the system—may be taking priority. [Continue reading…]