The boycott of the vote is the real winner of the Iranian presidential elections
From Jerusalem – Ebrahim Raisi is the new ultra-conservative president of Iran. The elections took place on June 18, after the list of candidates accepted by the Guardian Council, a body under the control of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was made public in May. However, if the regime was able to select candidates for the elections and exclude those who were annoying, it could not control the turnout, a great protagonist of these elections.
Before the elections, the Iranian authorities had said that the vote would be a "referendum" to renew the pact with the Islamic Republic, thus giving great importance to the turnout on June 18. Most Iranians have therefore seen fit to respond to the regime's appeal by staying at home and not appearing at the polls. In fact, the turnout was the lowest in the history of the Islamic Republic since 1979. If you do not count the null ballots (3 million voters would have voted in white or sketching on the ballot paper), the turnout was less than 40 percent.
Ali Fathollah-Nejad, an Iranian academic in Germany, told Radio Free Europe that the low turnout represents "a resounding rejection of the whole system" by the Iranians. Therefore, for Fathollah-Nejad, the winner of the elections was the "boycott", which was intended to deprive the Islamic Republic of the possibility of exploiting the turnout as proof of its legitimacy in the country. Norman Roule, a former CIA agent and well-known expert on Iran, has in fact posted a sarcastic comment on his Twitter page, in which he shows an image of Raisi with dozens of microphones in front of him and says: “There are more microphones than voters of the Iranian elections ".
Supporting this thesis is also the former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, excluded from the candidates of the elections on 18 June, who in recent years has turned into an opponent of the Ayatollah Khamenei regime. Ahmadinejad, who still remains an Islamic ultra-nationalist, has recently been able to amaze the West with his tweets in English from his official account, in which he writes about basketball and quotes songs by rapper Tupac (it seems that the former president is a fan of American rap and hip hop).
In a recent interview with Independent Persian , the enfant terrible of the Iranian political scene said that the Islamic Republic has lost the referendum it had held, stressing that elections must give the opportunity to express the will of a nation, and cannot be converted into an empty gesture, in which you throw only a piece of paper into an urn and then go home. "I don't usually expect elections to be a referendum, but in this case it was the authorities themselves who said it was a referendum and asked the people to go to the polls en masse, since every vote would represent the renewal of the pact with the Islamic Republic, ”said the former president, adding that he holds the Iranian regime responsible for the deterioration of the economic and political situation in the country. “I think those who are the cause of this situation should be held accountable. They should put aside their attitude of superiority and respond to the people, ”he reiterated.
Abdoreza Ahmadi, an Iranian dissident in Germany, summarized the vote well from his Twitter page: in the referendum to renew the pact with the Islamic Republic, 40 percent who went to the polls said "yes" to the Islamic Republic, the another 60 percent said "no". Simply put, the Islamic Republic has collapsed, but the sound of the fall has not yet been heard.
The post The boycott of the vote is the real winner of the Iranian presidential elections appeared first on Atlantico Quotidiano .
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Atlantico Quotidiano at the URL http://www.atlanticoquotidiano.it/quotidiano/il-boicotaggio-del-voto-e-il-vero-vincitore-delle-presidenziali-iraniane/ on Thu, 24 Jun 2021 03:50:00 +0000.