Approaching high noon

"They want to cover the ugly body of dictatorship with the beautiful dress of democracy." - Mohsen Mirdamadi, Iran lawmaker

The election crisis in Iran has become red hot.

Some 124 lawmakers in the 290-seat Majlis, or parliament, resigned Sunday in a dramatic gesture intended to force the clerical hierarchy to reinstate the disqualified candidates.

The mass resignation "will determine Iran's direction: rule of absolute dictatorship or democracy," reformist lawmaker Mohammad Kianoush-Rad told The Associated Press. ...

[Mahdi] Karroubi, the parliamentary speaker, launched a rare verbal attack on the Guardian Council, the unelected body of hard-line clerics that disqualified more than 2,400 reformist candidates from the legislative elections.

"Are you loyal to Islam if you pray daily, but then trample on the rights of the people?"

Despite an opinion from Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, that anyone who qualified for election before should be presumed to still be qualified absent clear evidence to the contrary, the Guardian Council reinstated fewer than half of those disqualified - and those were all low-profile candidates and included none of the reformers already in parliament. That prompted the mass resignation.

Meanwhile,

Interior Minister Abdolvahed Moussavi Lari, who is in charge of organising the poll, has warned that it will be "out of the question" to hold elections.

"The possibility of organising a free and competitive election does not exist," he said.

And yesterday

Iran's largest reform party said on Monday it would boycott the February 20 parliamentary election, turning up the heat on hardliners in the Islamic Republic's worst political crisis for years. ...

"We have no hope that a fair, free and legitimate election can be held on February 20. So in the current circumstances we cannot participate," Mohammad Reza Khatami, head of the Islamic Iran Participation Front (IIPF) party, told a news conference. ...

He stressed that while the IIPF was boycotting the election, it was not calling on Iranians to abstain from voting if the election takes place as planned.

President Khatami, who has several times toughened and softened his stand in what appears a so-far unsuccessful attempt at brinkmanship, pushing the Guardian Council while keeping rein on the reformers, could simply refuse to carry out the elections. He also could allow provincial governors to carry out their threats to resign. But

hardliners have threatened to prosecute any official who hampers the vote by resigning.

All this has happened, bluntly, because in the 2000 elections the Islamic radicals - much to their astonishment - lost control of parliament for the first time since the 1979 revolution. They are determined to get that control back - and if that means fraudulent elections, then so be it. At this point, elections held on February 20 could be no other kind.

I previously said that I expected the Guardian Council to back down far enough to persuade the reformers to accept the decision while still making it appear that they - that is, the council - are firmly in charge. What I wondered then was if the reformers got 75% or 80% of what they wanted, would that be enough. As it turned out, the Guardian Council did back down some, but not nearly far enough: Instead of 75% it was considerably less than half. In fact, I wonder why they thought what they offered would be good enough to resolve the crisis, especially since Khamenei's opinion about qualifying those already in office gave them a perfect out.

One possibility has been the lack of public outcry. There have been a few threats of street action, but nothing has materialized so far. The BBC reporter in Tehran suggests it's because people have become disillusioned with reform since almost all of the efforts of the reformists in parliament have been blocked by the Guardian Council, which has the power to veto any proposals. So the members of the Guardian Council may feel they can overcome any opposition with token moves - while being worried that doing more than that would encourage demonstrations in support of the reformers.

But if the public feels defeated, the reformers themselves seem in no mood to be passive. While some observers have suggested that the resignations were just a tactical maneuver because of the time it would take to process them, it seems at least equally likely that the reformers are ready for a showdown. So, again it seems, are the hardliners.

Footnote: Karroubi appealed to Khamenei for help in resolving the crisis. But Khamenei has left for an "undisclosed location" and is difficult to reach.

At least Pontius Pilate did it publicly.

Update: The Washington Post for February 3 reports that Ayatollah Khamenei has insisted that the February 20 elections be held as scheduled "under any circumstances," according to Rajabali Mazrouei, a reformist member of Parliament who is among those banned by the Guardian Council from seeking election.

In the wake of Khamenei's position, Iran's provincial governors, who are responsible for organizing the elections, said they would not hold them.

The opposition is getting more daring in other ways as well.

[R]eformist lawmaker Ali Akbar Mousavi Khoeini accused Khamenei of being behind the disqualifications.

"It's actually the leader who has effectively worked to undermine reformers in the past few years. Members of the Guardian Council carry out his orders," Khoeini told a student meeting at Amir Kabir University on Tuesday.

And the public may not be as quiescent as thought.

Meanwhile, the reformist-controlled Interior Ministry banned a demonstration by university students planned for Wednesday to denounce hard-liners. Student leaders also threatened to boycott classes if free elections are not ensured.

Reformist leaders say they have urged students not to hold street demonstrations because rallies against the unelected clerics will give hard-line vigilantes and police a pretext for cracking down.

Last June, such demonstrations were forcibly put down by a combination of police and hardline thugs. This time, then, demonstrators would go into the streets expecting that and for that reason might not be so readily dissuaded, the potential result of which I'm certain figures into the reformists' thinking.

The thing of it is, at what point might the students decide that a fraudulent election and a "crackdown" amount to much the same thing, so why avoid the latter by allowing the former?