‘We have finally learned to fight’

Some of the demonstrators said they support Mousavi and his platform of reform. Others want to overturn Iran’s entire theocracy. “My grievance is not only against Ahmadinejad but this bloody regime,” a 26-year-old journalist said. “The question is how to bring them down. I think if we vote for Mousavi, the space would be more open and we could continue our struggle in civil movements, such as those of women and students.”

There is little sense that popular anger in Iran is dissipating. Khamenei has asked the Guardian Council, which consists of 12 legal and religious jurists, to investigate the election results. But this has not satisfied opposition candidates or their supporters, who are demanding a new election. On Tuesday, despite a government ban, opposition supporters again rallied in Tehran to protest the election results. Supporters of Ahmadinejad, including those reportedly bused into Tehran, demonstrated elsewhere in the city.

“The Islamic Republic has reached a crossroads,” Mohamad Tavakoli, a professor of history and near and eastern civilizations at the University of Toronto, said in an interview with Maclean’s. “We are entering a period of really deep crisis. Either the political institutions of the Islamic Republic will mature and go beyond a simple role of Islamicizing the society and begin a new phase of democratization, or they will move into a dictatorial phase.”

Tavakoli is hopeful that Iran’s political institutions will democratize, that the Guardian Council will honestly review the election results and order a new vote if necessary, and that as a result Iran will emerge from this crisis more democratic and more legitimate. But Saeed Rahnema, a professor of political science at York University, doubts this will happen. He describes the Guardian Council’s inquiry as a thief investigating a theft. “They are the main culprits in the whole process of electoral fraud and the prevention of a democratic election,” he told Maclean’s.

But not all Iranian political elites and institutions are allied with Ahmadinejad. Mousavi has powerful allies in former presidents Mohammad Khatami and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Rafsanjani chairs two powerful government bodies: the Assembly of Experts and the Expediency Discernment Council. Ahmadinejad, on the other hand, can count on the Revolutionary Guards, the Basij, the security services, and many conservative clerics. Ahmadinejad’s forces might be stronger. But the fact that a popular uprising in Iran has supporters inside the political establishment is potentially destabilizing.

“If they can’t circle the wagons at the elite level, then they’ll never be able to get a hold of the streets,” Suzanne Maloney, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, told Maclean’s. The ability of Iran’s ruling establishment to circle its wagons is in doubt. Mousavi himself is a political insider. He was prime minister during Iran’s war with Iraq, but he is now willing to join protesters in the streets and defy the orders of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

According to Payam Akhavan, a professor of international law at McGill University, however, the “seismic shift” that has occurred is not the power struggles within Iran’s political establishment, but the fact that the Iranian people have so forcefully demanded change. “However much there may be factional politics among Mousavi and Ahmadinejad and Rafsanjani and others, underneath them the ground is crumbling,” he said in an interview with Maclean’s. “In a country like Iran, with its demographics, with its socio-economic level of development, you cannot simply rule through intimidation and terror. You need to have legitimacy.”

By apparently rigging an already flawed election, by shutting down freedom of expression by suppressing the media, by blocking email and cellphone communication, and by unleashing club-wielding goons against its own peacefully demonstrating citizens, the Islamic Republic has lost much of the limited legitimacy it once possessed. Millions of Iranians are unwilling to accept this.

“For years, I would say that I didn’t have hope in my people and that they would never move like they did in 1979,” said Mastaneh, the 23-year-old beauty salon worker in Tehran. “But I was proven wrong. We have finally learned to fight.”