The second round of sham elections in Iran was held on May 10, with a derisory 8 percent participation by the voting public. The first round to the 290-seat parliament and the 88 members of the Assembly of Experts, was held on March 1, when voter turnout was 8.2 percent. That round determined the allocation of 245 of the seats in the Majlis, with the remaining 45 decided in the second round, 16 of which were in the Tehran constituency. These were the first elections in Iran since the nationwide uprising in 2022/23 that followed the death in custody of the young Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini. The brutal crackdown by the regime on protesters led to over 750 deaths and more than 30,000 arrested, many of whom have been raped, tortured, and executed.
The increasingly psychotic Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei repeatedly urged voters to turn out in the elections, in a determined effort to validate support for his tyrannical dictatorship. However, a combination of voter apathy, disillusionment with the political system, lack of trust in the electoral process, restrictions on candidate selection, and perceptions of unfairness and lack of genuine choice in the elections, played a key role in the low turnout. It has come as a huge blow and a major embarrassment to the theocratic regime. 85 million Iranians know that the mullahs’ regime is on its last legs. They know that elections are a sham from the outset, with fundamentalist candidates carefully handpicked and personally approved by Khamenei before they are allowed to stand, and with widespread ballot rigging and voter fraud by the mullahs in a bid to boost the turnout and manipulate the results.
Undeterred by the reality of the situation, the mullahs’ Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi, a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander who is on the international terrorist list for bombing the Jewish Community Center in Argentina, absurdly told a news conference that 25 million of the 61 million eligible voters had cast their votes. Then, President Ebrahim Raisi, known as ‘The Butcher of Tehran’ for his key role an executioner during the notorious 1988 massacre of over 30,000 political prisoners, praised the "passionate turnout" in the elections, which he described as an "extreme blow" to opponents of the Islamic Republic. But the mullahs’ lies and fabrications have failed to silence widespread derision in the normally quiescent state-run media, with journalists and even regime officials describing it with phrases like “disaster,” “scandal,” “shame,” and “sounding the alarm bell.”
When the terrorist Interior Minister Vahidi made the outrageous comment that the elections marked a “heroic saga,” it sparked a storm of ridicule. Referring to the 8 percent voter turnout, the state-run Ham-Mihan newspaper sarcastically entitled it as the “Eight-Percent Heroic Saga!” The former Minister of Communications Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi was quoted as saying, “Presumably, their notion of heroism refers to the 92 percent non-participation in Tehran.” A former regime TV host said: “It is an honor for all of us that the Minister of Interior Affairs understands the concept of ‘heroism.’” Even the Javan newspaper, which is the unadulterated propaganda voice of the IRGC – the regime’s Gestapo, reported that: “In Tehran, we witnessed a significantly disappointing level of participation in the first round and witnessed an eight percent participation in the second round”. The ultra-conservative Resalat newspaper, under the satirical headline of “When ‘Everyone’ Showed Up!” mocked the regime’s claims of using the elections to purify its ranks and wrote, “When we said you’re not purifying the front, but rather emptying it, nobody paid attention." The Resalat article continued: “We expected these elites to foster unity and coherence, not for 92 percent of eligible voters to abstain and say ‘no.’”
The nationwide boycott of the polls has had a profound impact on the teetering regime. Khamenei thought that by appointing the extremist Ebrahim Raisi as president he would be able to quell further dissent from the rebellious public. The opposite has happened. Resistance Units of the main democratic opposition People’s Mojadehin of Iran/Mujahedin-e Khalq (PMOI/MEK) have burgeoned in towns and cities across Iran. Anti-regime and pro-PMOI/MEK graffiti, banners and posters appear regularly on walls and highway flyovers. IRGC compounds and regime offices have also been targeted. Slogans attacking Khamenei and Raisi have interrupted state-run national TV news broadcasts, with images of Maryam Rajavi, the exiled leader of the opposition movement. Blind panic has led to intense conflicts and power struggles within the regime’s senior ranks, with officials and insiders attacking each other and exposing each other’s corruption.
In desperation, Khamenei and Raisi have resorted to even further bloodthirsty oppression. In a frenzy of executions, 94 men and women have been hanged in the past month, several of them simply for protesting during the nationwide uprising in 2022/23. Raisi has ordered an intensive clampdown on women who do not comply with the strict Islamist dress code. Guidance Patrol or ‘morality police’ tour the streets of Iran’s towns and cities in distinctive green and white vans, with teams of black-chador-clad women pouncing on any girl or woman showing hair beneath her veil or hijab. Having learned no lessons from the death of Mahsa Amini, there have been further deaths in custody at the hands of the morality police. Khamenei tried to deflect public attention by warmongering across the Middle East, instigating the murderous Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, which sparked the ongoing catastrophic war in Gaza. Khamenei’s proxies - funded, trained and directed by the IRGC - are waging proxy-wars in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon and now Gaza. By launching an outrageous kamikaze drone and ballistic missile barrage against Israel on April 15, the Iranian regime ended years of shadow conflict and opened up a new potential for direct war with their age-old enemy Israel. By doing so, Khamenei hoped that the Iranian people would forget their animosity to his regime and rally to the mullahs’ flag.
The pitiful 8 percent turnout at the second elections has shown that his plan has backfired spectacularly. The Iranian people want regime change. They want freedom, justice, women’s rights, human rights, an end to the death penalty and an end to the nuclear threat. They don’t ask for Western military intervention. But they look to the West to show moral support for their Resistance movement and for their inalienable right to overthrow the dictatorial regime.