Part 18: How It Could of Happened

In any event, Mousavi became the ultimate dark horse candidate and his campaign caught fire in the short election period before the election on June 12. In many ways, Mousavi and those running his campaign had been underestimated as an organized and technologically advanced campaign started to emerge. Both the man himself and his campaign were more formidable than the conservatives could ever have imagined. There were a few reasons why Mousavi was able to gain traction and prove a viable opponent to Ahmadinejad.

Mousavi’s perceived flaw of being absent from the political scene suddenly became an asset as he became popular among younger Iranians. Nearly two-thirds of Iran’s population is under the age of 30 meaning that they have little or no memory of his time as Prime Minister. In the small inner circle of the Islamic Republic, Mousavi represented the closest thing to an outsider since a large segment of the population did not perceive him as tainted by the regime. Even popular reformist figures such as Khatami and Karroubi were recently in high positions within the Islamic Republic, but Mousavi seemed different because he had been gone for so long.

Another Mousavi asset was something new in Iranian politics: his wife Zahra Rahnavard. It was previously unheard of for the politicians’ wives to play a major role in the politics of the Islamic Republic. While there had been female members of parliament, Zahra Rahnavard became a critical part of her husband’s candidacy.

She appeared with her husband at public rallies and gave interviews about her own views. In particular, she became very popular with the young women of Iran who had few role models in the politics of the Islamic Republic. Her popularity reached a point in which she was compared to the American first lady Michelle Obama although she dismissed such comparisons, “I am not Iran's Michelle Obama. I am Zahra, the follower of Fatimah Zahra [the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad]”.

Technology also played a key role in enabling the Mousavi campaign to pose a serious challenge to Ahmadinejad. His campaign was able to quickly and cheaply mobilize people through newly emerging communication technologies that many young voters easily understood. Mousavi supporters would use text messaging to quickly organize political rallies and relay information about voting which would also be used later on to organize mass protests.

This was also the first election in the Islamic Republic in which the internet played a major role. In particular, the newly emerging social media sites of Twitter and Facebook created a new way for the opposition to organize outside of the tight control of the regime. Campaign platforms and speeches could be posted online for voters to see without first going through the filter of the regime. Mousavi’s official Facebook page would be one of the most important ways for him to communicate with his followers both before and after the election. These tactics became so successful that the regime even shut down Facebook and text messaging in the days leading up to the election in the hopes of slowing Mousavi’s momentum.

Perhaps the Mousavi campaign’s most effective strategy was also its simplest: the selection of green as the official symbol of his campaign. The campaign stated that green was an important color in Islam, but it provided an easy and quickly identifiable image which people could rally around. To the regime, it looked dangerously close to what they considered other “velvet revolutions” such as the Orange Revolution in Ukraine in which the opposition had used orange as a unifying color against the regime.

The actual campaigning for the election was the most competitive environment in the history of the Islamic Republic. For the first time, contentious debates between the candidates were held on national television with frank accusations of corruption and dictatorship hurled at Ahmadinejad. Mass rallies would be held by all side with thousands of people attending in an election campaign starting to look like those in Western democracies.

A public who had been apathetic about politics during the conservative crackdown of the 2000s suddenly found itself caught up in a competitive election. All sides mobilized their bases and long lines formed on Friday June 12, 2009 as millions of Iranians came out to exercise their right to democratically elect their president. Even though a victory for his campaign seemed impossible a few weeks ago, the surge in support seemed to suggest that Mousavi had a real chance at being the next president of the Islamic Republic of Iran. All of Iran and indeed the world anxiously awaited the results after a long day of voting, and then the results came.