Iran Goes from Bad to Worse Hardliners win elections, thanks in part to Trump's treaty withdrawal.

[riversedge]

Trump and his ego have to go!



Foreign Correspondent: Iran Goes from Bad to Worse

Hardliners win elections, thanks in part to Trump’s treaty withdrawal.


https://progressive.org/dispatches/iran-goes-from-bad-to-worse-erlich-200227/

by Reese Erlich February 27, 2020

TEHRAN—The parliamentary candidates had rented a large hall for a campaign rally, but only a few hundred supporters showed up. They came to see Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, a leading hardliner and possible presidential candidate next year.

As warm-up speakers droned on, the audience responded with ritualistic chants but little enthusiasm. Many stared at their smartphones. Then the event ended abruptly. Ghalibaf never showed up.

The hardliners, known here as principalists, won a landslide victory in Iran’s February 21 parliamentary elections but without the kind of enthusiasm that marked previous campaigns.

The principalists won all thirty seats in Tehran and 220 of the 290 total parliament seats. But the nationwide turnout was just 42.5 percent, compared to almost 62 percent for the 2016 parliamentary elections, and was the lowest since the 1979 Revolution. In Tehran, only 25 percent of eligible voters went to the polls.

The principalists defeated the reformists, who had previously dominated the parliament and supported President Hassan Rouhani.

A prominent journalist and reformist supporter predicted the principalist landslide. He told me that President Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear accord in 2018 and the economic problems stemming from U.S. sanctions “humiliated the reformists. It was Trump’s gift to the hardliners.”.......................................

[Igel]

1. The hardliners' screening out of hundreds or not thousands of reformist candidates didn't help.

That had little to do with xenophobic scapegoating and everything to do with hardliners' lust for control. Now, the economy's not great and there were protests because of that (and other things), but the protests, of course, have nothing to do with internal politics.

The humiliation of the reformers was a fairly real thing. Relevant? Not as much as we're left to think.

Had Trump's actions really fired up Iranians into support for hardliners, you wouldn't have seen a lack of interest. It's not, "Let's vote for the hardliners, they have our back" so much as, "Crap, I really don't like the week-old fish at the fishmonger's."