BY MA'MUD SHIRVANI
NEW YORK - Twenty-nine million people went to the polls and elected Seyyed Mohammad Khatami as the next president of Iran May 23. The turnout, 91 percent of those age 15 and over, was the largest in any presidential or Majlis (parliament) elections since the 1979 revolution that overthrew the monarchy and established the Islamic Republic.

Public opinion polls did not predict his victory, but Khatami won 69 percent of the votes nationally. In the capital city Tehran and its working-class southern belt he won 76 percent.

The new president is an Islamic cleric, widely known to be in favor of easing restrictions on democratic rights. He heads up Iran's national library and is a professor specializing in Islamic reform movements. Khatami had been the Minister of Culture for 10 years, before he was forced out of his post in 1992 for reducing censorship on books and periodicals. The turnout and the vote was a massive demonstration by workers, farmers, women, youth, and significant sections of the middle class of their desire for basic liberties and freedom of expression that was a central slogan of the 1979 revolution. For working people, this was also a chance to cast a protest vote against Khatami's rival, the well-known cleric and capitalist politician Hojatolisalm Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri.

Nateq-Nouri, speaker of the Majlis, enjoyed the backing of key figures in the state and clerical hierarchy, and his victory in the first or second round of elections was taken for granted by most bourgeois commentators before elections. The head of Islamic state, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had issued statements indirectly favoring Nateq-Nouri, but he received just 25 percent of the votes. In Kermanshah, where most people are of the oppressed Kurdish nationality, he received 13 percent as opposed to Khatami's 80 percent.

Question of democratic rights
Many people viewed a Nateq-Nouri victory as a prelude to further restrictions of democratic rights. As if to prove the point, the Council of Guardians, which has the final say on who is eligible to run, ruled 234 candidates off the ballot and approved the candidacy of only four, all of them men. Most members of the Council of Guardians are conservative clerics who supported Nateq-Nouri.

Azam Taleqani, a member of the Majlis who earlier had announced her candidacy as a test case for eligibility of a woman to be president, was among those ruled off the ballot. The spokesman for the Council of the Guardians who reported on the ruling did not address the woman question and gave no specific reasons for deletions. Referring to those who were ruled off the ballot he said, "Some of them had Marxist views or political problems such as having belonged to antirevolutionary groups or backing groups fighting the government."

The Council of Guardians ruling forced the electoral contest to be confined to ruling class factions and figures. Nateq-Nouri belongs to a faction that is sometimes called the "traditionalist right" and is based on the large merchants, known as Bazar. While Khatami declared that he was unaffiliated, he was backed by a faction identified with the outgoing president Hashemi Rafsanjani that aims to build a modern capitalist state using the government as a leverage.

Supporters of the "traditionalist right" have a majority in the present Majlis. That majority was obtained in the last elections by a series of decisions by the Council of Guardians that selectively ruled many candidates off the ballot, or refused to ratify the victory of some who won. In particular, this affected many women who had come forward to be candidates for the Majlis.

In this year's elections extralegal groups, known as Ansare Hezbollah (Supporters of the Party of God), generally considered to be supporters of Nateq-Nouri, heckled and at times disrupted the meetings of the opposition candidates. These kinds of groups, who are supported by the Bazar, have been active since early days of the revolution and have acted with impunity to stifle democratic discussion. They have never been popular with working people, but an effective defense has never been organized to stop their disruptions.

This year a group of Ansare Hezbollah disrupted an April 19 meeting where Khatami was speaking in the city of Mashhad. They accused the candidate of working secretly for imperialist governments. For the first time, sensing mass revulsion with those actions, some prominent leaders of Islamic Republic took their distance and condemned the disruptions. In the face of mass opposition, the disruption campaign fizzled out.

Anti-imperialist protests, labor actions
The presidential elections came in the wake of massive demonstrations that engulfed the country after the April 10 ruling by a German court that framed up leaders of Iranian government in assassination of Kurdish opposition leaders in Germany. Following that ruling, all the governments in the European Union except Greece, as well as some other imperialist countries, withdrew their ambassadors from Iran.

Iranians saw this as a new imperialist assault on their sovereignty. More than 100,000 demonstrated in front of German embassy in Tehran April 13. There was also a sit-in in front of the embassy by victims of chemical gas supplied by German companies to the Iraqi government during the Iran- Iraq war. At the same time Sepahe Pasdaran, the military organization that was built during the Iran-Iraq war to defend the revolution, conducted 200,000-strong air, land, and sea maneuvers in the Arab-Persian Gulf, where a major U.S. naval force is stationed.

Along with their participation in anti-imperialist actions workers have been increasingly involved in labor struggles. The elections registered a shift that has taken place in relations between the government and the masses. The capitalist rulers are no longer able to convince the working people that they should postpone fighting for their democratic rights and better living conditions because that would play into the hands of imperialist counterrevolution.

Early this year, oil refinery workers in the industrial city of Isfahan staged a one-day strike to publicize their demands for wage increases and other benefits. Refinery workers from some other cities expressed solidarity and collectively presented their demands to authorities, giving them a month to respond. Having received no satisfactory answer, they decided to travel to Tehran and demand a face- to-face meeting with the highest officials of the Ministry. On February 16, hundreds refinery workers from various cities converged at the headquarters of the Ministry of Oil for the meeting. Authorities brought in the riot police, attacked the workers, and arrested them. But this did not intimidate the workers, some of whom had volunteered and fought in the Iran-Iraq war. Government officials finally met with them and agreed to substantial pay raises, some amounting to 50 percent. This struggle became widely known around the country as a major victory for working people.

There was no working-class alternative in this election. The Workers House, which is a semiofficial workers organization, supported the candidacy of Khatami. He received higher vote than the national average in Tehran, indicating that heavily working-class vote of the suburbs of the city, constantly growing by new arrivals from the countryside. A Washington Post correspondent reporting from the working-class Tehran suburb of Akbarabad, where in a bus fare hike sparked a major rioting in April 1995, observed that Khatami "seemed to have many supporters."

Even in the city of Gum, the center of the Islamic clerical establishment, where leading theologians issued a statement saying they approved of Nateq-Nouri's Muslim credentials, vote counts were 59 percent to 33 percent in favor of Khatami, again indicating a heavy working-class vote for him. For working people, voting for Khatami was a protest vote against the ills of capitalism, especially against the merchant profiteers associated with Nateq-Nouri faction. A worker told the Financial Times correspondent Scheherzade Daneshkhu in Tehran that he had voted for Khatami because the Nateq-Nouri "lot have made our lives a misery with their high prices and inflation."  
 
 
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