Like Moving Mountains.
Words.
"..Iran is a classic example of managed democracy -- if it can be called a democracy at all. Iranians are not guaranteed freedom of speech or of the press. Political parties are heavily restricted. A small group of unelected clerics holds a monopoly on real political power, supervising elections as well as candidates. The latter can be rejected for belonging to the wrong religious group, for "indecent acts" or simply for failing to participate in Friday prayers with sufficient enthusiasm. Over-enthusiastic campaigners can be beaten up by police patrols, and in recent weeks some were. The central purpose of elections is not to choose a president -- that is generally done in advance -- but to reinforce the clerics' candidate's dubious legitimacy. For that reason, Iranian dissidents, both in and outside the country, usually call upon their supporters to boycott elections altogether.
And yet -- the elections Iran held Friday also proved just how powerful, and how ultimately uncontrollable, even the most heavily managed elections can be. Iran's elections might not have been free or fair but they did, as an Iranian friend of mine put it, expose a "serious factional divide that could not be dealt with behind the closed doors of the ruling oligarchy." They might not have presented society with two radically different candidates (Mir Housein Mousavi, the "reformer" in this election, presided over the mass murder of political prisoners when he was prime minister in the 1980s), but merely allowing the public the chance to vote against the current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, inspired the largest turnout anyone can remember. The press might not have been able to report everything that happened, but Iranians did attend electoral events in unprecedented numbers, hissing and cheering. The votes might not have been counted correctly, but the whiff of fraud has sparked the biggest wave of demonstrations Iranians have seen for a decade.
...One could argue -- and many Iranians do -- that the poll was farcical. But Iran goes to show that a bad election is better than none at all."
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