The Fragility of Khatami's Revolution

Thousands of young Iranians gathered in the town square in Yazd one afternoon after Iran's parliamentary election to see President Mohammad Khatami. A desert city known for its mild manner and graceful wind towers that catch the subtle breeze, Yazd is in Khatami's home province. He grew up in a small village called Ardakan approximately 25 miles away, where his father was a famous ayatollah, fondly remembered for keeping the religious flame lit during the darkest days of the shah's regime. The crowds were jubilant as they awaited the president's arrival. They wanted to hear from the local boy who became president, but, more important, they wanted to hear the president's reaction to his faction's victory in capturing a plurality of seats in the parliament. The February 18 election seemed to be the fairest in modern Iranian history and a turning point, minimizing the power of the conservative establishment, which had held a majority.

When Khatami appeared on the balcony of the hosseiniyeh, a religious gathering place in the town square, the crowd of mostly young men thrust themselves toward the iron barricades that the security men had set up to maintain control. They looked up to their president, who extended his arms high in the air to greet them, and shouted, "Khatami, Khatami, we love you." They were mesmerized by Khatami's mythical persona looming large against the sky above the fold. In his brief speech, the president said nothing of the reformist movement's electoral victory. Instead he promised development projects for Yazd province.

I mingled in the crowd and asked a few young men why they had helped turn an ordinary cleric into a charismatic figure. What was it about him that solicited such adoration? Their replies were that Khatami was their hope for a brighter future. Few could articulate the ideas behind the Khatami revolution or, as it is called, the Dovom-e Khordad, the May 23, 1997, landslide victory that brought Khatami to power. Here was a man who spent the better part of his life mastering Jean Jacques Rousseau and Alexis de Tocqueville to formulate his ideas for creating a civil society in Iran. But a much simpler message appeared to have been absorbed in the heartland--that Mohammad Khatami was the new charismatic figure, the most distinctive characteristic in propagating Shi'ite Islam. More than 70 percent of the electorate had participated in the February national parliamentary election, but their eyes focused on one man who did not run in the poll but for whom they voted in spirit.

The most recent results were viewed by many Western analysts as Iran's great step toward a modern democracy. Voting appeared to be free and fair with limited fraud at the ballot box. Attempts by a conservative-dominated election supervisory board, the Guardian Council, to eliminate reformist candidates, as it had done in many previous elections, were kept to a minimum. Public pressure for an untainted election was so intense that the Guardians feared the public's wrath more than they feared the likely outcome, that the conservative presence would be diminished in parliament.

The Guardians waited until after the election to make their move, when the world had its eyes on new sights. In May, they quietly nullified 11 constituencies nationwide and canceled 726,000 votes out of 3 million in Tehran, where reformist candidates won 26 of 30 seats in the first round of voting. The race in Tehran, Iran's political center, was the most heated, with both conservatives and reformists putting their leading lights on the ballot. Although this apparent rigging of the results did not fundamentally change the reformists' triumph by securing a plurality of seats in the new parliament, it made the Tehran election less legitimate by eliminating a fourth of the votes cast.

Iran's close brush with democracy soon evaporated into a replay of past elections. But even if the Guardians had permitted the...