Do you think Ahmadinejad really won the election in Iran or was it fixed?

[Jay T]

On NPR, they couldn't come right out and say it was fixed (because they try to be unbiased and accurate above sensationalism) but they had caller after caller telling them that the election was fixed and that "nobody" voted for Ahmadinejad.

What do you think?

[straightpet212]

FIXED. Iran did NOT vote that dictator in a second time...for God's sake, polls for Mir Hossein Musavi were at 85%, and Musavi somehow lost his HOME STATE in a landslide. Come on!

[Bob Loblaw]

On one hand, the results seem very suspicious....on the other hand, we can't even get accurate poling data in this country(remember Dewey defeats Truman?).....so it's hard to say for sure.....but I'm leaning towards fixed.

[tuna.talkalot]

Probably fixed. Nobody wins straight these days.

[zaphod73@att.net]

Fixed...I can't see how so many votes could be counted that fast and how a strong opposition candidate could have lost in his own home territory.

[straightachieve589]

I heard Ahmadinejad's supporters did everything in their power to prevent people who didn't favor their candidate from voting. It was a huge election scandal.

[Desk3Bound]

How in the world am I supposed to tell being 3,000 miles away and having never stepped foot in Iran?

[tinysun903]

Fixed, maybe, sort of like the election the USA just had.
They must have had an ACORN too.

[Derek]

Fixed. Moussavi lost his home town, his ethnicity, and the youth vote? No way! Ahmadinejad has run the Iranian economy into the ground, so there's no reason for people to vote for him. There was no officials from other countries in Iran to make sure the election was fair. How did they hand-count 35,000,000 votes in 24 hours? Also, there's no way an election that, by all accounts, was supposed to be close, could end up being a land slide by that large a margin.

[justgoodfolk]

There are no honest elections in Iran. They were probably rigged but I think Ahmadinejad would have won anyway. That caller clearly has no clue.

For anyone with a serious knowledge of Iranian society and politics, the decisive victory of Ahmadinejad could not have come as a surprise. Even Western newspapers that denounced the election admitted that the incumbent had strong support among urban workers and the rural poor—the vast majority of the population. Ahmadinejad has retained this constituency, despite the repressive and corrupt character of the regime, because of the absence of a socialist alternative.

On what mass base could Mousavi depend for a successful bid to unseat Ahmadinejad? The candidate of the Iranian liberal establishment, he campaigned as no less an ardent defender of Islamist clerical rule than Ahmadinejad. On domestic policy, he vaguely called for more openness, while opposing Ahmadinejad’s “populist” subsidies to the urban poor and the peasantry.

The media has not sought to explain why the mass of the Iranian people should be expected to support an advocate of the same free market policies that have produced a social disaster throughout the world. Mousavi’s most prominent backer, moreover, was Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a leading figure in the state apparatus and one of the country’s wealthiest men. Rafsanjani, notorious for his corruption, is despised by Iranian workers and the poor.

Mousavi’s actual electoral base did not extend beyond better-off-sections of the urban middle class, university students and businessmen.

It is this class divide that is largely ignored by the Western media. Mousavi’s so-called reforms were pitched largely to a relatively privileged and narrow social base. The reforms themselves consisted essentially of a toning down of the rhetoric employed by Ahmadinejad in order to smooth the way to improved relations with Washington, an easing of US-backed sanctions and the opening up of the country to foreign capital. At the same time, they were identified with “free market” capitalism and opposition to the social assistance programs for the working class and rural poor. Such austerity measures hardly served as a pole of attraction for these layers, which constitute the majority of the Iranian population.

For his part, Ahmadinejad utilized these programs—combined with populist demagogy and appeals to religious piety—to maintain a popular base for the regime.

The bitterness of the election campaign and its aftermath is a distorted reflection of the class tensions building up in Iran as well as a product of the increasing fissures within the ruling political establishment of the Islamic Republic, both of which are exacerbated by the pressure exerted by the US and the European powers.

All of those running in the election were vetted by the clerics on the Guardian Council and are members of the same political establishment.

Lionized by the Western press, Mousavi is an unlikely champion of “reform.” During the period he held the post of prime minister—1981-1989—he presided over mass executions of political dissidents, many of them leftists, as well as the Iran-Iraq War, in which Iran suffered a million casualties, dead and wounded.

Considered a “hardliner” during this period, he has been cast as a reformist and a modernizer in an appeal to the Iranian middle classes. Behind his campaign, however, are right-wing elements within the clerical hierarchy and, most importantly, former Iranian president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, reportedly the richest man in Iran.

While the differences between the sections of the regime backing Mousavi and those supporting the re-election of Ahmadinejad are of a tactical character, they are no less bitter because of it. Involved are major financial interests as well as concerns about how best to manage Iran’s relations with Washington and the other major imperialist powers.

The elections and the claims of fraud have been utilized by the major powers to orchestrate a campaign of pressure against Iran, aimed at bringing about a shift in policy that would favor their interests in the region.

Western pressure has no more to do with democratic rights in Iran than the arms and support provided to the Shah did 30 years ago. The aim of the US and the rest of the Western powers is to fully subjugate Iran in order to further their strategic interests in the region and fully exploit its massive energy resources.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jun200...-j16.shtml