Iran's Election Tension: Will the Losing Side Accept the Ballot Results?

By Robert Dreyfuss, The Nation. Posted June 11, 2009.

There's worry and anger about cheating and unfair campaigning. Yesterday, the state-run Iranian TV gave Ahmadinejad twenty minutes of free air time for a speech, while offering one minute each to his three rivals. (They turned it down contemptuously.) At a Mousavi rally, people chant: "Iranian TV has become Ahmadinejad's PlayStation!" A man says that if there is evidence of cheating, people won't stand for it. Later, the crowd chants: "If there is any cheating, we are going to make hell in Iran!" Rumors that people would storm the offices of Iranian TV if Ahmadinejad were given the free time proved unfounded, and the speech was aired without incident.

But there's an uneasy feeling that, especially if the vote is close, one side or the other won't accept the results. Perhaps the greatest danger comes from the angry, inflamed supporters of Ahmadinejad, though a highly informed analyst says that Iran's Leader, Ali Khamenei, will be able to control the backers of Ahmadinejad in the event of a Mousavi victory. But there's no question that Iran is highly divided, and when the results are announced -- probably Saturday morning -- there will be a few days of tension before it's clear how the voters on the losing side react.

"I hope the gap is wide enough that the losing side accepts it," says a well-known professor at Tehran University. If Ahmadinejad loses, if the gap is wide, Khamenei will put a lot of pressure on him not to make trouble."

The reality is that Khamenei and his all-powerful Council of Guardians has approved all four candidates, and virtually everyone I've spoken with says that the Leader will be happy if either Ahmadinejad or Mousavi wins. It's even likely that Khamenei may have decided that Ahmadinejad has served his purpose, and that a more acceptable, more moderate president would better serve Iran's broader interests. "When Bush was president, perhaps Iran needed a barking dog to response to the barking dog in Washington," says one Iranian observer. "But now, with Obama, it's different."

Perhaps. The neoconservatives argue that, whoever wins, the ruling powers-that-be will remain -- and that's true, as far as it goes. But there's no denying that two vastly different, competing social movements have been mobilized for this election, and that very real social forces are at work.

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Robert Dreyfuss is the author of "Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam" (Henry Holt/Metropolitan Books).

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