Iran: The Right to Pick a Lousy President

Two weeks after the Iranian election, and it looks increasingly likely that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will remain as president, at least for the time being. The crackdown on the activities of protestors and opposition activists continues, and it seems certain that the Council of Guardians, the group of senior clerics charged with signing off the election results, will give them their blessing when they deliver their final ruling on Sunday.

The widespread conclusion of many in the West has been that a monstrous injustice has been perpetrated on the Iranian people, who are being denied their rightful president thanks to widespread vote-rigging. Hasn’t the Council of Guardians already admitted that three million voters not on the electoral roll somehow managed to cast a vote? Doesn’t this prove that it was in fact challenger Mir Hussein Mousavi wot won it?

Maybe, but I’m not so sure. Conducting independent and reliable public opinion polling in a country like Iran will always be a challenge, and there has certainly been no shortage of ‘voodoo polls’ whose methodology is unclear and results sometimes bizarre. But there have also been a number of reputable surveys conducted over the last month, and most of them suggest that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in fact enjoys a substantial majority of support across the country as a whole. Others are in the pipeline.

The most widely publicised, conducted in late May by Terror Free Tomorrow, found that Ahmadinejad enjoyed more than a 2 to 1 advantage over Moussavi – comparable to the result of the disputed election. Now, TFT’s methodology has been criticised – their interviewers could only speak Farsi, whereas many Iranians can’t – but the findings are also in line with regular national polling carried out by, among others, Tehran University.

In contrast, many of the polls that put Moussavi ahead were Tehran-only, as this Wikipedia page shows. Tehran is very, very different from the rest of the country. It has a large number of educated, Western-oriented and relatively liberal elites - largely Mousavi voters. In contrast, whole swathes of rural Iran are conservative, highly religious and poorly-educated, with much of the population lacking a basic education.

Now, Ahmadinejad is not everyone’s cup of tea. He may even be, as a colleague of mine put it, a 'jackass'. But he has a worldview that, for various reasons, appeals to a great number of Iranians. This is still the country that ejected the Shah in 1979. Even election fraud on the scale reported (and we’re not talking Zimbabwe here) can’t explain away the huge Ahmadinejad advantage.

It looks like Iran may have actually intended to elect the 'jackass'. Shouldn’t they have the right to do that if they want to?