Iran’s New Revolution

ATTA KENARE/AFP/Getty Images Baby kisser: Could Ahmadinejad be a goner after Friday’s elections? FP reviews the best moments from a wild Iranian campaign in this photo essay. See also: The List: Iran’s Presidential Wannabes, by Kayhan Barzegar Who’s Winning on Google? By Scott Hartley Potato Revolutionary — a profile of Mir Hossein Mousavi by Mehrzad Boroujerdi

Every four years, in what has become a ritual of the country’s election season, Iran’s public broadcaster allots a half-hour of primetime to each of the country’s presidential candidates, to use as they see fit. Anticipation was highest for reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi’s film. Not only had Mousavi earned the devotion of much of the country’s youth and its urban middle and upper classes, but it was widely considered a coup that his campaign had signed one of Iran’s most beloved directors, Majid Majidi, to direct his campaign documentary. The film — inspiring set pieces from around the country and selections from the candidate’s life devoted to service, all deftly woven with religious undertones and nationalist music — didn’t disappoint.

There were also plenty of visual reminders that Mousavi has become a vessel for the hopes of the country’s fervent population of university students — the film didn’t lack for shots of chicly-dressed, flatteringly lit young people. But as Ali, a student at University of Tehran who supports Mousavi, put it, You get the feeling that the filmmaker was more impressive than the star. Ali shook his head contemplating all the mistakes his preferred candidate had made in the single half-hour of footage. Recounting a scene in the film where a young man together with his toddler boards Mousavi’s campaign bus to complain about the country’s lack of equality, Ali shrieked in despair: Why didn’t he kiss that baby?

It’s not a question that supporters of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have to ask. Ahmadinejad’s life on the public stage has been an uninterrupted display of populism, and his campaign style has reflected that, with call-and-responses designed to appeal to working-class voters and deliberately traditional respect paid to elders and, yes, to children. His ability to echo the culture is undoubtedly his greatest political talent — the common people never feel condescended to by their president’s embrace of their simple language and rumpled fashions.

Mousavi is an altogether more maladroit, disconnected politician. He sometimes mumbles through his public appearances and reads from note cards without looking up. Moreover, Mousavi — prime minister of the country during the 1980s and confidant of Iran’s rulings elites ever since — can’t and would clearly prefer not to make claim to the outsider, firebrand reputation that the current president has carefully cultivated during his time in office.

He talks only in generalities about his plans, his emphasis on competence and scientific management. He’s made promises to loosen restriction on personal freedom, but his ire is more drawn by Ahmadinejad’s dictatorial flouting of the checks and balances of the Islamic Republic’s constitution. Mousavi promises change, but no one would mistake him for Barack Obama. He might not even qualify as a Michael Dukakis.

But somehow this establishment technocrat continues to routinely elicit rock-star receptions across the country. In the run-up to the election, much of grayish Tehran has been draped in green, the official color of the Mousavi campaign. The police and khaki-clad national guards have been forced to watch every day as Tehran’s youth — Iran’s baby boom generation of the 1980s — assemble in giddy pandemonium, distributing green bracelets and banners of protest against Ahmadinejad’s presidency, proselytizing to undecided pedestrians and whenever in doubt shouting taunting cries of Ahmadi, bye-bye! At night, the chorus of chants and laughter and hastily written campaign songs mingle with the din of car horns.

Certainly, Ahmadinejad’s campaign outings can also get raucous. On Monday, the president canceled an appearance at an overcrowded rally in central Tehran out of concern for the safety of the attendees. (He ought to have been concerned anyway: The way the crowds stampeded to leave the confined space, everyone fearfully shouting and pushing, I consider myself lucky to have made it out uninjured.)

But the daily spectacles for Mousavi have assumed a scale that is unprecedented for the Islamic Republic, and it’s precisely the novelty that fuels the participants’ fervor. Occasionally, Tehran’s teenagers and twentysomethings gain enough distance from their fun to witness and admire what they’ve produced; sometimes they’re prompted to consider their place in history. As dusk settled one evening and an impromptu parade passed us on one of Tehran’s main thoroughfares, Fatemeh, a student at Tehran University clad in a dark green headscarf, shook her head. We’ve never seen this before, she said with a tremble. This is our revolution.

Our revolution in contrast to their revolution — the revolution of her parents, the events of 1979. It is the sort of language, even in the context of a sanctioned election, that would seem to burst the bounds of the ambiguous red lines that circumscribe public discourse in Iran. Yet few of the demonstrators feel they are tempting a crackdown, and they’ve not yet earned the ire of the authorities who are notorious for keeping a close watch on public demonstrations.

For now, Mousavi’s de facto leadership of the demonstrators grants them a certain dispensation. Much as Ahmadinejad would like to suggest otherwise, no one who makes such repeated and ready allusions to his participation in the establishment of the Islamic Republic and to his personal acquaintance with Ayotollah Khomeini, as Mousavi does, could be seriously suspected of subterfuge. Indeed, the fact that the reformist candidate is someone so closely identified with the early years of the revolution and the 1980s war with Iraq has opened a window for young Iranians to see that period afresh.

The Islamic Revolution has long held manifold meanings in Iran, both sacred and profane. It’s so much at the center of Iranians’ current collective imagination that it’s impossible for them not to see it from different angles. Fatemeh and the other young Iranians on the street are not rejecting the revolution of 1979. Instead, the students are making claim to the revolution — in a social sense. Fatemeh’s not referring to the way the Iranian revolutionaries toppled a government, but to the way they flooded the streets, created new channels of expression, and found themselves riding the crest of a social phenomenon of their own making. In the absence of homecoming rallies, young Iranians settle for campaign songs.

And the Iranian reformists, after all, don’t offer hope of a brand new society. The main candidates and their advisors all trace their political lives and their political vocabularies from the revolutionary events of 1979. However much its immediate resonance may be diminishing among the young, the revolution is inescapably institutionalized.

It follows, then, that when the election votes are tallied, the street revelers will accept the results peacefully, if with varying degrees of joy — and afterward they’ll probably fade altogether from politics until the next presidential election comes around. With no political parties to keep them moored after the campaign offices are closed down, the students will be on their own, packing away their green wristbands, left to decide how involved they want to be in the hassles and doubletalk of day-to-day politics. Add to that the fact that reformist political networks lack the stability and security of their conservative counterparts. If the country’s highest authorities didn’t have that reassurance, the atmosphere in Tehran right now would likely be much more tense.

Meanwhile, the students are hoping for a Mousavi victory, though they predict hard times no matter who comes out on top. The dangers of another term for Ahmadinejad are obvious. But if Mousavi prevails, most Iranians anticipate that conservatives entrenched in the government bureaucracies will feel compelled to flex their muscles, as they did during the administration of Mohammed Khatami, Iran’s previous reformist president.

For now, however, the students don’t seem bothered, not by potential hurdles down the road, nor by their candidate’s current charisma gap, nor even by the fact that they can’t name any of his specific policy platforms. To the extent that their motivation is at all political, they are sustained by the prospect of booting out the incumbent. As one student put it, in strongly accented English, Our goal is simple. Anybody but Ahmadinejad.