Iran Elections

Well, they held an election and people came. The predictions of the "experts" once again were confounded. We were told for weeks that the Iranian masses were so turned off by the bogus Iranian electoral process that they were bound to boycott the election. It didn't happen. We were also told that it would be a cakewalk for former president Hashemi Rafsanjani -- it wasn't.

NYT reports:

TEHRAN, Iran — A former speaker of the parliament, who offered everyone in the country the equivalent of $60 a month if elected president, appeared to be the first-place finisher in Iran's president election, the Interior Ministry announced this morning. But according to the preliminary results, he failed to win enough votes to avoid a runoff against the former two-term president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

The results, based on an incomplete sample and not adjusted for voting patterns, could still change markedly. But if they stand up, they will have confounded all polls and conventional wisdom by showing Mehdi Karroubi, the former speaker of the parliament and a moderate, reformist cleric, drawing 22.6 percent of the vote, with more than 12 million votes, about 40 percent of the expected total, counted. Rafsanjani was a close second with 21.2 percent, and officials said it was not clear which candidate would eventually turn out on top.

Turnout, put preliminarily at 55 percent by the Interior Ministry but thought to be running closer to the 68 percent recorded in the last presidential election, also confounded the experts.

The apparent outcome signaled a crushing defeat for the leading reform candidate, Dr. Mostafa Moin, who polls had showed to be running in second place and who had the support of some of the nation's top reformers, including those who worked closely with the outgoing president, Mohammad Khatami. Moin finished fifth.

Interesting. The only clear indication here is that the Khatami regime has been solidly rejected by the electorate. To what extent this is based on Iran's continued confrontation with the West over nuclear arms is unknown. Rafsanjani has publicly pledged that he will seek better ties with the West, and particularly the US. All in all, the elections have so far had a mildly positive outcome.

Stay tuned.....,

Read the article here.

By the way..., is there any politician in Iran that the NYT will not refer to as a "reformer"?

RELATED:

BBC has a nice little article on Iranian bloggers and the election.

The Persian blogland is less than four years old, and so Friday's presidential election is the first of its kind in the post-weblog world.

Iranian weblogs, one of the largest web communities in the world, owe their significance to the welcome they have received from middle-class Iranians inside and outside the country.

Thousands of voices not heard via Iranian state-owned media can now express their views through the internet.

During the past weeks, the Iranian urban middle-class has published a huge amount of articles on weblogs about its preoccupation with the presidential election. They have left no stream of thought unrepresented.

These discussions are invariably about one of two topics: Boycotting the election or voting for three of the candidates - former police chief Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, former science minister Mostafa Moin or former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

The other candidates are not talked about as such on the weblogs.

Boycotting tension

Many bloggers have been calling for a boycott of the election after becoming disillusioned by the reformists.

Read it here.

What jumps out from this article is how misleading bloggy opinion can be. Bloggers have been calling for a boycott of the election and many in the blogosphere assumed that it would take place. Instead people turned out in large numbers to vote.