The Political Consciousness of Iranian Youths

Katajun Amipur, writing in Der Tagesspiegel, explains the attitude of Iranian youths toward the recent elections.

"There is no such mood of change as we saw in the election eight years ago (when Mohammad Khatami was elected president). Because the experience of recent years showed the youth that participating in the election brought them no influence at all in politics, not to mention setting the Islamic Republic on a reform course. Most of them think: we've voted for the reformers four times in the last eight years. But reform from within isn't possible, because there's nothing to be done against the bulwark of conservatives. That's why so many of them escape. Either inwardly, into the private sphere where they throw wild parties and take all kinds of drugs, or they flee the country. For years the citizens of the Islamic Republic have voted with their feet. Each year 200,000 people leave Iran, and more would go if they could – mostly well-educated young people. The brain drain does no end of harm."

Original in German here.

Extract in English here.

This might explain why the blogosphere is filled with predictions of uprising in Iran and why those predictions never come to pass. Young people dream of radical change but despair of ever achieving it in their homeland.

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The Telegraph reports:

The upmarket district of Fereshteh is the only place in Teheran where the traffic jams are welcome. Every evening, the young and well-to-do of Iran, driving their smartest cars and wearing their best clothes, crawl around a mile-long circuit in the narrow side streets hoping to meet members of the opposite sex.
....

The latest suitor to have gone a-wooing round Fereshteh, however, is not a love-lorn twentysomething but a grey-haired, septuagenarian cleric by the name of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was on the hunt for votes.

In one of the most audacious bids ever to capture a "youth" vote, the conservative Islamic revolutionary rebranded himself for Iran's bitterly-fought presidential election last Friday as a champion of the young, using a Western-style marketing campaign that owed more to Nike than the Koran.

Not only did the 70-year-old former president open a campaign office on Fereshteh's sunset strip, he also hired an army of hip, happening underlings to spread his message across the capital.

....

Thanks to work by Mr Rafsanjani's supporters in recent weeks, his campaign stickers can be seen all over Teheran, wrapped around lamp-posts and plastered on pavements, cars and motorbikes, even adorning the headscarves of attractive young women.

Leading up to Friday's polls, crowds of young supporters held "spontaneous" rallies in his honour, and celebrated Iran's recent qualifying victory in football's World Cup by chanting his name.

Which, incidentally, is no longer "Mr Rafsanjani", "His Holiness', or "His Excellency". Instead, he now styles himself simply as "Hashemi" - his middle name, and a form of address usually reserved for intimate acquaintances.

You've gotta admire the audacity of this guy.

Read it here.

Robert Mayer over at Publius Pundit sees the disaffection of Iranian youth as a positive political statement. They boycotted the elections, he argues, based on blogosphere reports, to protest the current government. I'm not so sure that the political motivation is paramount. Passive disaffection is not the same as a boycott. Read Robert here.