Part 15: People Stop Participating

While the relatively free elections of the late 1990s saw widespread participation among the population, the elections in the mid 2000s were marked by public apathy after conservatives clamped down on the democratic process. Public participation in the Islamic Republic plummeted as a far smaller percentage of eligible voters took part in the elections.

Figure 4.1 shows the overall downward trend of public participation in presidential, local, and parliamentary elections from 1997 to 2005 by tracking the percentage of eligible voters who actually voted in elections. The points mark the actual percentage of participation while a regression line demonstrates the overall downward trend.

Figure 4.1 Percentage of the eligible population participating in elections from 1997 to 2005

The chart demonstrates that a significantly smaller percentage of the population participated in the Islamic Republic as the conservatives began to clamp down on democratic rights ensured in the constitution. The public participated in the system in greater numbers when they believed that their votes had a real chance at changing the regime. Once conservatives made it clear that they were not going to allow the elected branches of government to bring about significant changes, the public decreased its participation in elections.

This trend means that less people would work within the confines of the regime when they believed their votes would not bring about change. The fact that large numbers of people would abandon participating in the Islamic Republic would foreshadow future protests against the regime when elections were viewed as completely meaningless. Once people believed that elections were fraudulent, then opposition to the regime would work outside of the confines of the regime to bring change by taking to the streets.

In the mean time even though segments of the reform movement had abandoned participating in the regime, a significant portion still wanted to work within the elected channels to bring change. However, they did not have enough support to override the resurgence of the conservatives ultimately losing out again in the 2006 local elections and the 2008 Majlis elections. While the reformists did not know how to respond to the clamp down by the conservatives, they did not give up contesting elections regrouping for the looming 2009 presidential election.

The Iranian people may have participated less in the electoral process once the conservatives struck back, but they still had to live with the outcome of those elections. Even with the failure of reformist electoral victories to bring change to the regime, anger at the direction of the country under Ahmadinejad meant that the public would be lured back into the electoral process.

Elections no longer had to be about changing policy in the Islamic Republic as long as they offered the possibility of changing the person who was president. This scenario would set the stage for the final showdown between a resurgent reform movement and the conservative coalition that wanted to maintain its authoritarian gains. What resulted was a complete breakdown of the Islamist coalition that had maintained the Islamic Republic for 30 years leading to the return of revolution in Iran.