RFE/RL reports: Iran’s president has broken a long-standing taboo by publicly defending a reformist predecessor, but his remarks were met with a muted response.

In a speech broadcast live from Mohammad Khatami’s hometown on March 7, President Hassan Rohani hailed the former reformist president as a “dear brother.”

The crowd in the central Iranian city of Yazd cheered wildly at the mention of their native son. But Iran’s state-run IRINN television, well aware of a long-standing media ban against mentioning Khatami’s name, quickly cut the volume. [Continue reading…]

Rouhani praises ex-Pres Khatami visiting Yazd, audience erupts in cheers, stateTV mutes them
[2nd half from YouTube] pic.twitter.com/QlIGIBCWYX

— Hadi Nili (@HadiNili) March 7, 2016

Azadeh Moaveni writes: I remember vividly the first time I ever voted in an Iranian election. It was a balmy summer day in June 2001, in the election that won the reformist president Mohammad Khatami a second term. The blue stamp was the first on the voting page of my identification card, and I felt a sharp, exhilarating pride.

That election is much on my mind now, as I watch the results of Friday’s voting with my family, disagreeing on what it might mean for the future.

Back in 2001, Iran was heading down an irrevocable path toward internal reform, a process untainted by any Western intrusion, with citizens and progressive-minded leaders showing the way. Those leaders seemed, at the time, as exciting as Vaclav Havel and the revolutionary cleric Musa al-Sadr rolled into one. Elections felt — unlike the vote this past weekend — full of consequence, a genuine chance to recast political power rather than an exercise in slightly recalibrating it.

Tehran then was a naïve young intellectual’s paradise. There were Islamist reformers and secular reformers, women’s rights campaigners who went door to door in villages, and urban activists working to save everything from the Iranian cheetah to the rapidly evaporating Lake Urmia. You could sit at the feet of an ayatollah in the morning and hear a Koran-backed strategy for gender equality; by afternoon, you could be with the radical student opposition in a decaying house in the center of the city, still strewn with shredded documents removed from the United States embassy during the 1979 hostage-taking. There were literary readings almost every night, and subversive theater that lampooned the system, using metaphors from baseball to Moliere.

The reformists in those days were punchy; they invoked Karl Popper, and said one day freedom would come to Iran, and we would all support the Palestinians and thumb our noses at the West and be a beacon of progress for the rest of the Middle East, which in those days was a political wasteland, the kind of place that “didn’t have politics.” [Continue reading…]

Hooman Majd writes: Wash, rinse, repeat. If you’re a politician in Iran running for election or re-election, your best bet is to have the endorsement of Khatami. Mohammad Khatami, that is. In another era, Khatami was twice elected president, but today he is banned from leaving the country and his name and face are banned from the domestic media. No matter, his hands suffice these days: Election posters for the Reform and moderate list of candidates running for parliament last week showed only them, recognizable from the ring on his finger. People knew what that meant. Simultaneously, a reminder that he was backing the candidates and a “bilakh” (the finger) by the Reformists to those who insist he is so dangerous that his very features must remain hidden from the public.

Iranians are good at giving the finger: They collectively raised it almost three years ago, too. The same Khatami, only days before the 2013 presidential election — enough time for a message to register, but not enough time for hard-liners to counter it — endorsed the lesser-known Hassan Rouhani and urged the electorate to make their voices heard. They followed, if only to give the finger to those, inside and outside Iran, who claim Iranian elections don’t matter. This time, he endorsed a long list of candidates — whose names would have to be handwritten on ballots by voters — via video on the popular messaging app Telegram. To be safe, the video was also uploaded to YouTube, which is censored in Iran but available to those who want to access it via VPN. Wash, rinse, repeat.

There was always something unclean (haram) about certain members of parliament. Members who Iranians and outsiders alike call hard-liners, some who even threatened Rouhani’s Cabinet members — not with censure for making a nuclear deal with the West, but with death, buried in concrete, as one member of parliament, perhaps channeling Tony Soprano, suggested, and not in jest. As of this writing and where the vote count stands, parliament appears to have been washed and rinsed of that particular stain. Representing Tehran province, which has 30 seats in the parliament, the hard-liners have all but disappeared. There will be quite a few left in the body, of course, but they are somewhat defanged, if not fully declawed. And as with any bad stain, repeated washing and rinsing will eventually fade even the most stubborn. That is what voters seem to want, judging by how they also approached voting for the other state body — the Assembly of Experts. [Continue reading…]

Reuters reports: President Hassan Rouhani and his allies won big gains in elections that could deepen Iran’s engagement with the world after his government ended years of sanctions by agreeing to curb its nuclear program.

The outcome in the results for Tehran on Monday was a blow to the conservative Islamic establishment, although it retains decisive power due to Iran’s unwieldy dual system of clerical and republican rule.

Most of the lawmakers who failed to win re-election to the new parliament strongly opposed the nuclear deal, including Mehdi Kouchakzadeh, who called Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif a traitor, and Rouhollah Hosseinian, who threatened to bury the negotiators under cement for agreeing to concessions to world powers.

“This election can be a turning point in the history of the Islamic Republic,” said an editorial in reformist newspaper Mardomsalari, whose managing editor, Mostafa Kavakebian, won a parliamentary seat in Tehran.

“The biggest achievement of this election is the return of reformists to the ruling system … so they won’t be called seditionists or infiltrators anymore,” he said, referring to hardliners who accused reformists of links to the West.

Rouhani and allied centrists and moderates won 15 out of the 16 Tehran seats in the 88-member Assembly of Experts, which is tasked with choosing the country’s next supreme leader, final election results for Tehran showed. Some of the 15 elected in Tehran were in both conservative and reformist electoral lists. [Continue reading…]

Barbara Slavin writes: When given the chance, Iranians have generally voted for reformists or pragmatists, from Mohammad Khatami for President in 1997 and 2001, to Rouhani in 2013. The exception was Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a populist hardliner who defeated a former President, Hashemi Rafsanjani, in 2005 and won again in 2009 in elections marred by fraud. Reformists swept parliamentary elections in 2000 but were disqualified en masse by the Guardian Council in 2004, 2008, and 2012.

The Guardian Council also ruthlessly pruned the candidate roster this year, removing nearly half of the more than 12,000 people who sought seats in the 290-member parliament, including almost all declared reformists. But a surviving reformist leader, a Stanford University-educated engineer and former Khatami Vice President, Mohammad Reza Aref, cobbled together candidates most supportive of Rouhani and the nuclear deal. Bolstered by a social media campaign that included a video of Khatami urging people to vote, this “List of Hope” swept all thirty seats allotted to the capital, Tehran. Among those defeated was the top hardline candidate, Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, a former Speaker of parliament whose daughter is married to Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba.

In polling for the eighty-eight-member Assembly of Experts, Rafsanjani, a former Chairman of the body, led the field for sixteen seats in Tehran. Among those who failed to make the cut was Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, who is known as “Ayatollah Crocodile” for his anti-democratic views, and Mohammad Yazdi, the incumbent chair of the Assembly.

While the final tallies depend on runoff elections in some constituencies, the gains for more pragmatic figures, particularly in parliament, should make it easier for Rouhani to implement economic reforms and to appoint and retain qualified cabinet ministers.

As the scope of the mandate became clear, Rouhani told the official Islamic Republic News Agency on February 27: “It’s time to open a new chapter in Iran’s economic development based on domestic abilities and international opportunities…The people showed their power once again and gave more credibility and strength to their elected government.” [Continue reading…]

Ian Black reports: Even the most optimistic estimates say that reformists and moderates – once distinct terms that are now blurred – are unlikely to take more than 80 seats [in Friday’s parliamentary elections]. “We are not going to have a carnival,” concedes Mohammed Ali Vakil, a leading reformist candidate. “But a lot of people will vote for us. They will be calm, but they will surprise us.”

Sadegh Zibakalam, a political scientist who is campaigning for the reformist alliance, agrees. “I am excited,” he told the Guardian by phone while getting the vote out in Khuzestan in the south-west. “If we can persuade 10%-20% of undecided voters to overcome their indifference and go to the polling stations then there could be a historic outcome. Conservative voters are determined and will definitely vote. It’s the reformists who are undecided.”

Apathy is a huge problem, however. “I voted for the revolution when I was a young man, and that was it,” shrugged Hassan, a burly 60 something driver stuck in the traffic around the capital’s Ferdowsi Square. “Why should I bother now?”

The cynicism is just as strong in the leafy north Tehran suburb of Jamaran, where Ayatollah Khomeini lived. “If you are educated you never vote because you would just make a fool of yourself,” said Negin, a young dentist smoking shisha with four friends – their loose headscarves, makeup and fashionable clothes and boots a reminder of far-reaching social changes of recent years. “It’s easier to live in Iran without thinking about politics,” sighed Melina, a designer. [Continue reading…]

The New York Times reports: They clapped and cheered, and many shouted for the release of their political leaders under house arrest for the past five years. Some held up pictures of a popular former president, Mohammad Khatami. Pictures of his hands, to be exact, because displaying his portrait is illegal.

The young supporters of Iran’s reformist movement gathered behind the safe walls of a sports hall last week to campaign for elections on Friday for Parliament and an influential clerical council. Their longstanding demand has been tangible change, but the forced absence of most of their political leaders illustrated how far they were from their goal of a new and modern Iran.

A decade of relentless pressure from the judiciary, the Revolutionary Guards and clerical councils dominated by hard-liners has confined Iran’s reformists. The reformists were a force during the presidential contest of 2009, but the movement was decapitated after its political leaders voiced support for the millions of people who took to the streets to challenge the fairness of the vote. Reformist parties were closed down, and hundreds of activists, politicians and journalists were given long jail sentences.

The election of President Hassan Rouhani in 2013 raised the hopes of the reform movement, and Iran negotiated a nuclear deal with the West and rejoined the world economy. But internally, virtually nothing changed. The political space remained constrained, and the hope that reformers would re-emerge as a guiding force has not come to fruition. [Continue reading…]

Scott Peterson reports: It was Hossein Dehbashi’s magic touch that added some of the inspirational glitter to Hassan Rouhani, when the cleric promised Iranians a new era of moderation and hope, and won the presidency by a landslide in 2013.

Not only did Mr. Dehbashi create the candidate’s two campaign videos, but he added a passion project of his own: An emotional Iranian version of President Obama’s “Yes We Can” video, which portrayed Mr. Rouhani as an inclusive, modern leader and brought tears to many Iranian eyes.

That video, “New Voyager,” marked Rouhani’s first 100 days in office and scored half a million hits in the first 48 hours it was posted online.

But as Iran prepares for parliamentary elections on Feb. 26, Rouhani’s shine has faded for Dehbashi and other disgruntled supporters who say he has failed to keep promises of loosened restrictions and an improved economy. [Continue reading…]