Iran’s Peculiar Election: The Role of Ideology

Issue Date October 2005
Volume 16
Issue 4
Page Numbers 52-63
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Iran’s June 2005 presidential elections caught the world by surprise. All the reformist candidates failed in the first round, while the runoff saw pragmatic conservative ex-president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and his platform of more social (as distinct from political) freedom lose to economic populist and Islamist hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmedinejad. Experts have scrambled to explain what the results say about Iran’s voters. After opting four times for reformism since 1997, have they renounced such aspirations in favor of a shift back to oil-financed welfarism replete with Khomeini-era slogans against wealth and corruption? Has a reform movement that focused on political rather than socioeconomic issues roused a voter backlash? Or is the result a rebuke of the ruling clerical caste with its violent repressiveness and notoriously ill-gotten wealth?

About the Author

Ladan Boroumand is a historian and the cofounder and senior fellow at the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center for Human Rights in Iran. She is currently writing a book on the tectonic social changes taking place within the Islamic Republic of Iran.

View all work by Ladan Boroumand