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Think Again

Last Friday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected with about two-thirds of the vote. Supporters of his opponent, both inside and outside Iran, were stunned. A poll revealed that former Iranian Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi was beating Ahmadinejad. It is, of course, interesting to meditate on how you could conduct a poll in a […]

Last Friday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was re-elected with about two-thirds of the vote. Supporters of his opponent, both inside and outside Iran, were stunned. A poll revealed that former Iranian Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi was beating Ahmadinejad. It is, of course, interesting to meditate on how you could conduct a poll in a country where phones are not universal, and making a call once you have found a phone can be a trial. A poll therefore would probably reach people who had phones and lived in Tehran and other urban areas. Among those, Mousavi probably did win. But outside Tehran, and beyond persons easy to poll, the numbers turned out quite different.

Some still charge that Ahmadinejad cheated. That is certainly a possibility, but it is difficult to see how he could have stolen the election by such a large margin. Doing so would have required the involvement of an incredible number of people, and would have risked creating numbers that quite plainly did not jibe with sentiment in each precinct. Widespread fraud would mean that Ahmadinejad manufactured numbers in Tehran without any regard for the vote. But he has many powerful enemies who would quickly have spotted this and would have called him on it. Mousavi still insists he was robbed, and we must remain open to the possibility that he was, although it is hard to see the mechanics of this. ~George Friedman

This matter of polling seems quite relevant, since I have heard quite often about these late polls showing Mousavi ahead by large margins or neck-and-neck with his opponent. This is treated as significant proof that massive fraud must have occurred. For much of our presidential election, we were frequently hearing about the “cell-phone effect” and the possibility that traditional phone polls were missing a lot of new voters who only used their cell phones. What if there were an even more distorting “no phone effect” that would make the results of polls skew heavily in favor of those who were far more likely to support Mousavi? What if Mousavi’s reported late surge was a chimera? How much of the Mousavi voters’ outrage is of the 1972 “no one I know voted for Nixon” variety? What if Iran’s so-called “silent majority” is not opposed to the regime as it currently exists as most observers seem to assume? The most important question might be this: why haven’t we been asking these and other questions from day one?

Friedman continues:

It also misses a crucial point: Ahmadinejad enjoys widespread popularity. He doesn’t speak to the issues that matter to the urban professionals, namely, the economy and liberalization. But Ahmadinejad speaks to three fundamental issues that accord with the rest of the country.

Friedman goes on to mention piety, corruption and national security as these three issues. Certainly, I thought that Ahmadinejad would pay a price for the country’s economic woes, but I may have erred by assuming that economic woes necessarily translated into anti-incumbent sentiment in Iranian presidential elections. What if Iranian voters are attracted to Ahmadinejad’s populist measures, even though the policies pursued under his tenure have been exacerbating Iran’s economic problems rather than ameliorating them? Suppose that “it’s not the economy, stupid” in Iran despite current economic woes. Why should Iranian elections be any less likely to turn on “values” questions than ours? Indeed, given the openly religious character of the regime and the still-limited power of the Iranian presidency, both of which would minimize the importance of technocratic policy debate, why wouldn’t “values” issues have an even greater role? Here is the most heretical thought of all: what if Ahmadinejad appears to a majority to be the real reformer, and Mousavi is seen as an ally of a corrupt establishment? The ambiguity and amorphousness of what “reform” means in the Iranian context should make us more careful in how we think about the political realities of the country.

Suppose for a moment that most Iranians see Ahmadinejad as a majority of Americans sees Obama. No doubt this will be considered an unspeakable comparison, but just think about it for a moment. Perhaps they like him personally, give him the benefit of the doubt, and find his opponents and their proposals to be ridiculous. As important as it is to understand the contesting interest groups involved, we should not rule out the role of personality and charisma in election outcomes. We see Ahmadinejad as a blundering buffoonish thug, but that does not mean that this is how most Iranians see him. Perhaps Iranian voters respond to economic insecurity by rallying to a religious, cultural populism that offers them some feeling of control and restored social stability. Perhaps they really do look askance at predominantly urban proponents of economical liberalization–it would hardly be the first time that the latter would be out of step with the broad majority of their countrymen.

Friedman continues:

Perhaps the greatest factor in Ahmadinejad’s favor is that Mousavi spoke for the better districts of Tehran — something akin to running a U.S. presidential election as a spokesman for Georgetown and the Lower East Side. Such a base will get you hammered, and Mousavi got hammered. Fraud or not, Ahmadinejad won and he won significantly. That he won is not the mystery; the mystery is why others thought he wouldn’t win.

One of the claims made in the “coup” argument is that it is implausible that there would be a swing in the electorate from backing Khatami just eight years ago to backing Ahmadinejad. It is quite possible that the events of the last eight years have changed voting preferences in Iran just as they have here. We might remember that two of the most lopsided presidential elections in our history occurred just eight years apart in 1964 and 1972, and the winners came from different parties and ostensibly represented significantly different political platforms. Without putting too much emphasis on such comparisons, they should make us think again about what we think we know about the last few days.

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