Part 12: The Reformists Blink

One of the most famous victims of this effort would be the reformist intellectual Saeed Hajjarian who was the leading architect of the reformists’ electoral victories and who was himself elected to the Tehran City Council in the 1999 local elections. In March 2000, Hajjarian was shot in the face leaving him paralyzed in an attack that reformists would attribute to the paramilitary group known as the Basij. Others would also be swept up in this new round of institutionalized terror aimed at undermining the reform movement.

Prominent reformist clerics such as Abdollah Nouri, Yousefi Eshkevari, and Mohsen Kadivar would be tried and sentenced to varying time in prison for supposedly undermining the Islamic Republic (Tapper et. al 2006, 133). These clerics, with their religious critiques of the regime, posed a particularly devastating threat to a regime that based much of its legitimacy on religious credentials. The combined effects of political violence and arrests would deprive the reformists of some of their leading intellectuals just as they would need them the most.

With the takeover of the Majlis in 2000, the stage was set for a confrontation between reformists who wanted to pass progressive legislation and conservatives in the regime who wanted to stop democratic change. Reformists had an ambitious agenda to transform the Islamic Republic by passing laws to reform press freedoms, women’s rights, elections, and overall transparency within the regime. Although conservatives allowed the reformists to get their foot in the door of the elected institutions in the regime, they would use the authoritarian components of the constitution to render the reformists impotent in their attempt to change the regime.

As reformists started to introduce pieces of legislation to reform the system, Khamenei would take unprecedented steps to interfere in the elected branches of the government and undermine their efforts at reform. The defining moment would come in November 2000 when the Majlis was considering a new Press Law that would challenge conservative restrictions on the media. Khamenei sent a letter to the Speaker of the Majlis Mehdi Karroubi “urging that in the interests of stability and harmony the legislation be deferred to an unspecified later date”.

In this moment of truth, the reformists backed down and allowed Khamenei to successfully shelve the proposed law. Rarely had the Supreme Leader ever taken such direct actions to basically dictate the business of the Majlis. Given the vast powers of the Supreme Leader within the constitution, it is not clear whether he was making a request or if he had the authority to dictate what the elected branches of the government could do. In the end, Khamenei effectively was able to stop the Majlis from considering pieces of legislation meaning that the reformists’ effort to pass progressive legislation was dead.

With his legislative agenda defeated by the conservatives, Khatami went into the 2001 presidential elections with little to show for in terms of major reforms. At the same time, conservatives were even more unpopular than before precisely because they had undermined the reformists’ efforts to change the regime. Voters still wanted to have Khatami as the president and he was re-elected with 78% of the vote over token conservative opposition. Yet it was a shallow victory for Khatami and the reformists since the previous year had shown that winning elections did not translate into changing policy in the Islamic Republic.

At this point, the reformists were still willing to participate in the elections and work within the confines of the regime. While their experience in elected government had shown that real change could not be quickly brought to the regime, they were still part of that same regime. In the end, they had in an incentive to maintain the system and work from within to slowly bring about change. As the conservatives would begin their complete purge of reformists from the elected branches of government, that incentive would eventually disappear.