Interpreting Iran’s election

The Economist asks the questions on many people’s minds following Iran’s presidential elections:

WAS it a backlash by Iran?s devoutly Muslim poor against a corrupt elite? Or was it a massive fraud perpetrated on the people by the hardline clerics? Perhaps it was a bit of both. Whatever the case, the margin of victory for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the second round of Iran?s presidential election, on Friday June 24th, was striking. Mr Ahmadinejad, the mayor of the capital, Tehran, and a hardline religious conservative, garnered around 62% of the vote, despite having gone almost unnoticed in the field of seven candidates who had contested the first round of voting, a week earlier.

However, Gordon Robison has an op-ed in the Beirut Daily Star suggesting that the western media fell down on the job in covering the Iranian elections:

So Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani is not Iran’s new president. That result must come as a particular surprise to anyone who tried to follow the campaign by light of the Western media. As recently as last Thursday – the day before the run-off vote between Rafsanjani and his rival, Tehran mayor Mahmood Ahmadinejad – reputable polls gave the latter a clear lead. Yet headlines in the International Herald Tribune continued to describe Rafsanjani as the “front-runner.” In the run-up to the first round of voting on June 17, his campaign was the focus of most election coverage in the Western media. CNN’s interview with Rafsanjani during the campaign treated him as a president-in-waiting. So what happened, exactly?…. The answer may be much simpler, if no less embarrassing: Granted how little most of us outsiders know about the politics of the Islamic Republic, it was probably just easiest to focus on Rafsanjani because he, alone among the candidates, was a familiar figure to Western journalists…. Prior to the election [reformer Mustafa] Moin was often seen in the West as Rafsanjani’s main competition. The assumption in that narrative was that Rafsanjani represented the conservative old guard. Moin, a former cabinet minister who was initially barred from standing by Iran’s Council of Guardians (the body that approves potential candidates for Parliament and the presidency), was seen as the obvious successor to Khatami. That might have been true, but it ignored the fact that there is more than one type of “reform.” Reform can mean loosening restrictions on how people dress and behave in public and private. But it can also mean tackling corruption and cronyism – which was the vein of popular anger into which Ahmadinejad tapped.

Well, to be fair, some of the western media had already figured some of this out:

In truth, so much of this [analysis about Iran’s election] is rubbish and disinformation. The country’s supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, remains firmly in charge of the country — exactly as he would have been had Mr. Rafsanjani won the other day. The pop analysis aside, the election will have no effect on Iran’s weapons of mass destruction or its role in supporting terrorism.