In Tehran

February 22: Iran Parliamentary Elections
Conservatives: 221 (seats)
Independents: 38
Reformists: 20
Undecided: 11
5 seats guaranteed for religious minorities

“Reformist, conservative—it doesn’t make a difference when at the end of the day someone else is making all the decisions,” a friend told me last month about why he wouldn’t be voting in the Iranian parliamentary elections. As the economy continues to falter under United States sanctions and local mismanagement, inflation runs wild, jobs are scarce, and authorities put more pressure on the people, this is a sentiment I have heard repeated among most of my friends, family members, and colleagues. It remains unchanged, if not strengthened, after the hardline elements of the establishment—revolutionary-minded, mostly elderly men whose chief focus in leading the country is sustaining strict Islamic ideology—won a sweeping victory on February 22.

In the past four months, Iranians have endured a sequence of traumatic events. It started in November 2019. Against the backdrop of worsening quality of life under severe US sanctions, the government of President Hassan Rouhani abruptly announced at midnight that it had implemented a gasoline-rationing scheme that caused prices to so much as triple. People poured into the streets across the country. In response, the National Security Council cut off Internet access for almost a week as security forces brutalized protestors, killing between 300 and 1,500 people, according to different estimates.

In Mahshahr, a city in the southwestern part of the country, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) massacred protestors using tanks and heavy machine guns.

Just over a month later, the threat of war hung over Iran and the region after US President Donald Trump ordered the assassination of top Iranian military commander Qasem Soleimani in Iraq. At least 56 people died in a stampede at Soleimani’s funeral processions in his native Kerman.

Iran fired missiles at two US bases in Iraq as revenge for the killing on January 7. In the process, it created another tragedy at home. Shortly after the missiles were fired, a passenger airplane carrying 176 people of different nationalities crashed near the Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran just minutes after takeoff. After three days of firm denials, Iranian authorities finally admitted that the IRGC had “unintentionally” shot down the airplane after mistaking it for a cruise missile. Days later, they admitted that two missiles had been fired at the aircraft. The black boxes of the airplane have yet to be handed to another country for data analysis. Families continue to demand answers.

Angry protests over the downed plane were put down using rubber bullets and tear gas. The students who led the protests captured the pain and rage of many Iranis in a statement they posted online in English and Farsi:

We wash away blood with more blood, we add pain upon pain, we wash the corpse of one martyr with the blood of another martyr. It seems that history has been compressed. We experience one crisis after another.

Finally, just two days before the parliamentary elections, the Iranian government suddenly announced that the novel coronavirus had made its way into the country. Two people were dead in Qom, a religious hub just south of Tehran. (The latest official figures say that 2923 are infected and 92 are dead across the country.) Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei blamed the virus and “propaganda” by enemies for an all-time low turnout of 42 percent in the parliamentary elections. (In Tehran, turnout hovered around 25%.) But he also thanked the people for their “huge participation.”

Iranian parliamentary elections have always been heavily affected by the decisions of the Guardian Council, a 12-member ultraconservative vetting body that consists of six clerics appointed by the Supreme Leader and six jurors indirectly appointed by him. But this year, the council made an unprecedented decision that sealed the fate of the elections long before the polls opened: it rejected half of the roughly 15,000 people who signed up to be an MP this year, including academics, local government officials, and 81 sitting MPs. The official explanation for rejecting so many candidates was financial corruption for some, “lack of active commitment to the Islamic Republic” for others. In mostconstituencies, not a single reformist contender ran. The 290-seat Parliament is now dominated by conservatives and hardliners, potentially signaling more strained ties with the West and less inclusive representation for women and minority groups in Iran, as well as anyone who does not support the religiously-based hardline approach.

Conservatives took all 30 seats in Tehran, the capital city. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, an IRGC commander and former Tehran mayor with a string of corruption cases and property scandals, topped the list with just over a million votes.  Many expect him to become the new speaker of the parliament.

There also seems to be little doubt that a conservative nominee will emerge victorious in the 2021 presidential elections. In this case, all three branches of power—executive, legislative, and judicial—will be controlled by hardliners. It is very likely that conservatives are gearing up to tighten their grip on power until 2025 or beyond.

That is a grim prospect for many Iranians who have developed a deep-rooted distrust of the establishment. The Islamic Republic used to be described as a curious mix of theocracy and democracy. The democracy part of the mixture, however constrained it was before, seems to be shrinking by the day. “It’s ridiculous,” a 56-year-old woman who works in a government agency told me about the past few months. “It all seems like what you would see in a badly exaggerated movie that you’d walk out on.”

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To better understand why millions of Iranians—especially Iranians under 30, who make up 60 percent of the population—are so frustrated and angry, it is important to explore how Iranians felt just a few years ago. When president Hassan Rouhani campaigned on the promise of ending isolation and engaging with the West to improve the lives of average Iranians, he inspired many voters to hope for a better future. His administration reached a landmark nuclear accord with world powers in 2015, which lifted UN sanctions in January 2016. The business elite from all over the world raced to be the first to enter a huge, largely untapped market. In the parliamentary elections that February, a bloc of reformist and centrist politicians affiliated with Rouhani’s coalition made their way into the assembly with a 62 percent vote count. Tehran’s 30 seats were won by reformists. A record number of women became members of parliament. The most prominent was Parvaneh Salahshouri, who gave fierce speeches in Parliament on the subject of women’s rights.

Many Iranians expected that the economy, and by extension the country, would open up and that the country would enter a new period with greater freedom of expression and movement. Foreign trade would support the government in its efforts to curb inflation, create jobs and improve quality of life. It would also boost the private sector, diminishing the IRGC’s hold over the economy. It seemed possible that a greater engagement with Europe and the United States and bigger gains for reformists would translate into more freedom of expression, more discussions about social and human rights like greater freedoms for women.

Perhaps not even Iranian hardliners could have imagined what a gift Donald Trump would be for them. Surrounding himself with a team of Iran hawks, Trump unilaterally withdrew from the nuclear deal and imposed the US’s harshest ever economic sanctions on Iran as part of a “maximum pressure” campaign. Coupled with local mismanagement and corruption, the sanctions have wreaked havoc on the Iranian economy, decimated the livelihoods of middle and lower-class Iranians, and painted an uncertain future. The Iranian rial lost much of its value, tripling or quadrupling the price of nearly all goods compared to just two years previous. Incomes have not grown in tandem. Many Iranians have said goodbye to the prospect of buying a house or a car and many have been forced out of metropolises like Tehran to suburbs. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) predicted that Iran’s economy will have contracted by 9.5 percent with a 35.7 percent inflation rate by the end of the 2019/2020 financial year.

Hardliners, who always opposed the nuclear deal, have seized this opportunity to bolster their position, saying that the West cannot be trusted since the US unilaterally reneged on the agreement. The idea of reformism is now dead in the minds of many Iranians.

Most recently, their empowerment has resulted in Iran’s return to the blacklist of the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), the global watchdog dedicated to tracking money laundering and terrorist financing. In 2016, the Rouhani government committed to an action plan that required passing four bills to address money laundering and terrorism financing loopholes—a plan that became a proxy battle for Iran’s relationship with the rest of the world. Earlier this year, the hardliner-dominated Expediency Council, appointed by the Supreme Leader, rejected the bills. The blacklist furthers the isolation of Iranian businesses, banks and people. The only other country on the list is North Korea.