This week, central Tehran was dotted with posters and billboards for the six candidates running in Friday’s presidential election, and the streets were packed with buses carrying supporters to campaign rallies, yet it was hard to even find enthusiasm to vote, let alone for any of the candidates.
Iranians head to the polls A special election was held to select the successor to former President Ibrahim Raisi. Death in a helicopter crash in May.
The election comes at a critical time for Iran’s leadership. Years of sanctions have crippled the country’s economy, and individual freedoms and expressions of dissent have been increasingly suppressed under Raisi’s ultra-conservative leadership. Yet the government is keen to persuade more Iranians to turn out in large numbers, as turnout is seen as a measure of its support and legitimacy.
After years of voter boycotts and apathy, that may be a challenge, judging by the handful of interviews in recent days. Despite the risks of speaking freely in Iran, conversations with more than a dozen government workers, students, businessmen and other ordinary men and women revealed a degree of fatigue and even skepticism.
Even those who said they would vote — though few were willing to say for whom — said they did not believe their lives would change in ways that would matter to them.
“We have been losing ground, we are crying inside; I can’t afford the machines I need to work,” said Ibrahim, 53, an industrial engineer who owns a cement business in the northern city of Tabriz. Like most Iranians interviewed in the days before the election, he did not want to give his full name for fear of retaliation from the authorities.
Iran’s economy has struggled in recent years, partly because of U.S. sanctions imposed after the collapse of a 2015 nuclear deal, but also because of economic mismanagement by the country’s clergy and military rulers. Iranians have also resented restrictions on their personal lives, particularly requirements that women wear headscarves, which led to mass protests in 2022.
They have periodically heard presidential candidates promise to change the status quo, and they heard those promises again in this election. But in the past, under moderate President Hassan Rouhani or reformist President Mohammad Khatami, they have at best won some legal relaxations on personal freedoms, only to face repression under conservative successors like Raisi.
They know that the final say on all matters in Iran rests with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and they cannot influence his decisions.
Protests have taken different forms since the uprisings in 2009 and 2010 over what was widely seen as electoral fraud, and the violent crackdown in 2022 that saw executions and imprisonment for wearing headscarves. One form is boycotting elections to show that the people reject any candidate allowed to run by the government, which vets all candidates.
Conversations with many ordinary Iranians revealed dissatisfaction with Iran’s current leaders, though older generations like Ibrahim derive a certain satisfaction from their early experiences after the 1979 Iranian Revolution.
Ibrahim and his family visited a mausoleum in southern Tehran dedicated to the ideological leader of the revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, which was the most important event in Iran in the past 50 years and still affects Iran’s domestic and foreign affairs.
The vast golden mausoleum, with its mosaic-covered dome and soaring golden minarets visible from miles away, stands in stark contrast to the decay many Iranians feel today, and although I visited on a religious holiday, the sprawling complex and its many parking lots were virtually empty.
“I witnessed two generations — I was seven when the revolution broke out — the revolutionary generation and the next generation,” he said.
“After the revolution, we saw more sacrifices, everyone thought they were brothers and sisters, and there was this philosophy of martyrdom, everyone was ready to give their life for the country,” he said, referring to the Iran-Iraq conflict that ended in 1988 at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Iranian lives. Although the true number is unknown.
But now, if there were another war, “I don’t think they would go and fight for their country.”
He said his children wanted to leave Iran to study. His daughter, Faizeh, 21, who speaks English, made it clear that she wanted to study artificial intelligence and engineering, saying she would neither get the education she needed nor find a high-paying job after graduation if she stayed in Iran.
“I don’t think I have a good future here,” she said, adding that she wants to attend the University of Texas in Austin or Dallas. “We have a lot of resources and wealth in our country, oil and gas, but it has nothing to do with our lives.”
She added: “We need more individual freedom.” Under Raisi, Iran Increased scrutiny Many websites are now blocked in Iran and can only be accessed through the use of virtual private networks (VPNs).
“I’m taking an artificial intelligence course on Coursera, so I need a VPN,” she said. “This has nothing to do with politics. Why should the government care?”
But will she vote in the election? She shrugs and shakes her head.
Many young people expressed similar sentiments. At the Tajrish bazaar in northern Tehran, many women wore scarves draped over their shoulders, only occasionally covering their heads. A brother and sister – he recently graduated with a degree in pharmacy, while she plans to pursue one herself – were shopping together. They were reluctant to discuss the election.
“You know, we don’t even want to talk about politics,” said Pedran, a 25-year-old pharmacist who will not vote “because we know all the politicians will let us down.”
Will he leave Iran? “Maybe, but it’s difficult to be honest and our family is still here.”
Those most likely to vote are those who participated in the 1979 revolution, or at least have childhood memories of it, and who have often served in government for a long time. They also tend to have fought in the Iran-Iraq war and have a deep attachment to the country’s revolutionary identity.
Hussein Nasim, 56, who runs a rug shop in Tajrish Bazaar, said he was passionate about voting on Friday. He was imprisoned for seven years during the Iraq war — he became a soldier at age 17 — and he has one request for the next president: Keep Iran out of war.
“Let’s keep away any kind of invasion,” he said, adding that the leaders of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps were “peace-loving people” who were working to avoid conflict. Major General Qassem Soleimani, Khamenei, who led Iran’s powerful Quds Force, which is responsible for Iran’s external defense and was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Iraq in 2020, is the kind of leader who “can organize people very well.”
General Soleimani, whom the United States has labeled a terrorist, was responsible for establishing Iranian-backed armed groups across the Middle East that helped Nasim achieve his goal of keeping Iran out of war. These groups — Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, Hamas in Gaza and various militias in Syria and Iraq — give Iran deniability when it comes to launching attacks against Iran’s enemies, including Israel and the United States.
Masoumeh, a 27-year-old accountant who came to the shrine to pray in a conservative black robe with her 6-year-old son, seemed to be pursuing the same sense of purpose as Nasim and Ibrahim, an industrial engineer from Tabriz, in the early days of the revolution.
Speaking of Khomeini, she said: “I was too young to remember the revolution, but I know that many young people followed him and he strengthened Islam in Iran.”
“This revolution is like a miracle for Iran. It makes Iran different and we should continue on its path,” she said.
