By Jules B, Parti Communist Francais, in Paris
On February 21, elections were held to the legislative assembly in Iran. While the regime is facing more opposed than ever it is out of the question that the election result, which strengthened the hold of the hard-line Islamists in the parliament, will change anything fundamental. The electoral system, in any case, is totally fixed by the unelected Guardian Council, composed of ayatollahs and religious leaders, which systematically rejected any candidate who was at all likely to opposed the regime.
The very low turn-out in these elections – around 42 per cent (and lower in large cities like Tehran) – compares with nearly three-quarters in the last presidential election in 2017.
Several hundred killed
Iran has experienced its biggest-ever anti-government protests in recent months and this opposition movement has been against the entire ruling political class of the Islamic Republic, including the ‘supreme ruler’, Ayatollah Khaminei. The repression used the regime up to now, including over several hundreds killed late last November, will not be enough to stop new protests in the longer run.
Iran’s economic crisis, considerably aggravated by the US trade embargo, is pushing more and more Iranians into opposition to the regime, despite repression. Unemployment and inflation are reaching almost unbearable levels for the working class, whose problems have been made worse by recent government austerity measures. It is common knowledge in the streets of Iran today that privilege, corruption and patronage are now endemic within the Islamic Republic.
Demonstrations mark a turning point
The first wave of demonstrations in recent years were in December 2017 and they were fairly limited, both in terms of the number of cities concerned and the numbers of demonstrators, with a few tens of thousands. But they marked a turning point because as well as social and economic demands, for the first time, slogans appeared that were openly hostile to the regime itself. In the past, such as at the time of the demonstrations in 2009, after the re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the demonstrators’ anger was mainly targeted at the sections of the Iranian political system. Protesters at that time, therefore, supported so-called ‘moderates’ or ‘reformers’ who were not so much opposed to the regime as to the incumbent leadership.
Those same reformers are in power today and, far from improving the situation of the most precarious layers of the working class, they have implemented austerity measures, including cuts in social spending and higher fuel and food prices. It has been these measures, announced by Rohani in the 2018 government budget, that were initially behind the protest movement.
At that time, the relatively small scale of the opposition and the repression, led by the so-called Revolutionary Guards, allowed the regime to quickly quell the protest.
Military adventures
The most recent opposition movement, begun in November last year, following the announcement of new fuel price taxes, has been far more serious and protracted, not only in terms of its scale, but also in terms of the wide scope of its political demands. It.
While the regime can spend money liberally on religious institutions and pro-regime militias and on external military adventures in Syria, Yemen and Iraq, it is the labouring masses who have to pay for the economic crisis into which the country has been plunged.
The recent demonstrations are the most massive that the country has known since the fall of the Shah in 1979. For ten days, hundreds of thousands of Iranians took to the streets across the country to denounce the regime, the dictatorship of Rohani and Supreme Leader Khamenei. Banks, police stations, government sites, bases of the basijis (pro-regime militia) were set on fire, as were portraits of Khamenei. This time, Rohani, like the hard-liners of the regime, denounced the demonstrators as “anarchists”, guided by the United States and Israel. The demonstrations have been repressed with unprecedented violence, with somewhere between 200 and 1,500 dead, according to sources (only 5 according to the Iranian authorities) as well as several thousand wounded and multiple arrests.
Assassination of Soleimani
Protests resumed in January after the assassination of General Soleimani by a US drone in Iraq. At first, in the days that followed, it looked like the massive funeral demonstrations in homage to the general could have led to some consolidation in support for the regime. But when the government admitted that the Iranian Guard had shot down passenger Flight 752 of Ukraine Airlines, killing all 176 passengers and crew (including 82 Iranians), after having denied it for days, the mood turned one hundred and eighty degrees into one of bitter opposition to the regime.
From January 11 and in the days that followed, demonstrations were held in many cities across the country, with the largest in Tehran. Social media networks were widely used to organise mobilisations and many well-known personalities from the media, film and culture joined the demonstrations. Once again, the regime restored to brutally suppressing the movement, although with fewer victims than in November.
Criticism of Leader is outlawed
The Islamic Republic will not be changed or reformed and it offers nothing but unending repression and austerity to the big majority of the population. Any criticism of the Supreme Leader or the religious character of the government and its institutions is deemed to be a criminal offence.
The entire situation offers no other alternative to the Iranian people than a violent revolution to bring down the Ayatollah’s regime. Despite the organizational difficulties for those in opposition, the pace of protest movements has accelerated significantly in recent years and the scale of their political demands are starting to shake the highest levels of the state.
The regime has now exhausted all alternatives, it has nothing left to give but greater repression. We must expect, therefore, that the Iranian workers and youth will take to the streets again and again in the coming months. In the short and medium term, for this regime, it is now all about survival.
February 27, 2020
