Unofficial information has advanced this morning that participation in the parliamentary elections in Iran has reached 40%. If confirmed later this afternoon, it would be the lowest result in an election since the Islamic revolution of 1979.
Participation is the closest measure to know the degree of adherence to a regime with elections from which the reformist candidates have been removed, after having passed through the sieve of the authorities. Thursday’s elections were the first elections held after the 2022 protests over the death of the young Mahsa Amini at a police station, where she was taken for not wearing the veil.
To demonstrate how vivid the memory of those events is among the Iranian high authorities, it is enough to say that this morning Shervin Hajipour, the singer who composed the most sung anthem during the protests over the death of the young woman, was sentenced to three years in prison. Hajipour had won a Grammy for the song.
On Thursday, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, had encouraged the population to vote on state television, aware of the scrutiny to which the regime is being subjected. “Vote as soon as possible… Today, the eyes of Iran’s friends Iran and those who wish us evil are focused on the results. Make friends happy and enemies disappointed.”
Khamenei was the first to cast his vote of the 61 million Iranians with the right to vote in yesterday’s parliamentary elections, in which a strong abstention was already perceived, calculated, according to previous polls, at around 60%. Something similar happened in 2020, when only 42.5% went to the polls, thus marking a sharp decrease since 2016, when 62% voted.
However, and despite an atmosphere of little motivation in the face of candidacies – 15,000 – that barely leave room for moderates – 30 seats in Parliament out of a total of 290 –, state television and news agencies made an effort to present a image of enthusiasm among those who came to vote, including the Sunni and Christian minorities.
The Electoral Commission had announced an extension of the election day by two hours, so that the 60,000 polling stations could close at eight in the afternoon.
Hundreds of activists, politicians, students and teachers, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi, who called the elections a “farce”, called for abstention. Just yesterday, the singer Shervin Hajipour announced that he has been sentenced to three years and eight months in prison for a song that was chanted during the protests over the death of the young Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini in 2022.
