Notable and Surprising Phenomena in the 2016 Election Results

The 2016 elections demonstrated that the ruling class could bring its own representatives into the Assembly of Experts and the Islamic Consultative Assembly without concern, minimizing the rotation of elites. In this election, members of the ruling class competed for government resources while vying for the allegiance of the government’s subjects. However, this election also had differences from previous ones: the defeat of the Society of Teachers in Qom indicates the superior power of clergy and military-oriented forces over traditional clerics in this city. The votes from this city contrast sharply with those from Tehran, which supports normalizing relations with the outside world, while the leadership and security forces are primarily aligned with the elected officials from Qom rather than those from Tehran. The Society of Teachers only provided an electoral list for Qom, which was also unsuccessful. This defeat occurred despite the endorsement of candidates from this group by the Followers Front. Ali Larijani, as an independent candidate and former Speaker of the Parliament, received only 162,000 votes, or 35% of the votes (compared to 65% in the previous election), while Amir Abadi Farahani, a candidate from the Stability Front, garnered 225,000 votes, or 48%. The election results indicate that independent candidates secured about 20 to 30% of the parliamentary seats (depending on whether independence is defined by absence from lists or disavowal of list presence). These candidates presented themselves as independent from both the authoritarian and reformist factions to the public (before or after the elections), but it is unclear which ideological faction they are closer to. The rise of independents can be explained from three perspectives: 1) the increasing cost of belonging to a faction during elections and later in parliamentary factions alongside the declining benefits of these factional affiliations; 2) the growing influence of the leadership apparatus, which is not pleased with either a bipolar or multipolar political landscape. The leadership desires to guide political institution members as politically unidentifiable particles; and 3) the continuous increase of security and military forces in the parliament, who wish to pledge their loyalty entirely to the leadership apparatus. Hashemi Rafsanjani is the most successful individual in this election. Over the past six years, he has challenged the leadership apparatus (the Leadership Council proposal) and Khamenei's positions and military institutions (opposing military intervention in Syria) and has faced attacks from all sides. Almost all titles, including demagogue, low capacity, corrupt, deviant, seditionist, and English agent, were used against him by Khamenei's close associates. He even introduced Rouhani as someone who had 3% of the votes and, with his support, reached 51%, claiming credit for the establishment of his government. All this animosity and the efforts of his opponents to marginalize him had the opposite effect, and after his defeat in the sixth parliament and the eighth presidential election, where his candidacy for the tenth presidential election was not approved, he managed to rise from the ashes of these provocations and stand tall. Despite his dark history in human rights and governmental corruption, Hashemi has been a shrewd player within the framework of realpolitik in Iran. The negative voting campaign aimed to eliminate Ahmad Jannati, Mohammad Taqi Misbah Yazdi, Mohammad Yazdi, and Sadegh Larijani from the tenth Assembly of Experts. What eliminated Misbah and Yazdi was not the negative voting campaign but the high participation of the people of Tehran in the Assembly elections. The strategic mistake of the Assembly of Experts was to hold its elections simultaneously with the Assembly of Councils to increase participation. Even without this campaign, Jannati, Misbah, and Yazdi would not have received high votes due to their alignment against Rouhani's government and the continuous attacks from military-oriented authoritarian forces against Rafsanjani, just as they did not receive high votes in previous elections. In the fourth Assembly elections, Yazdi, Jannati, and Misbah received approximately 970,000, 930,000, and 870,000 votes, respectively. In this round, they received approximately 1.2 million, 1.3 million, and one million votes, which was more than their votes in the previous round. The negative campaign did not reduce their votes compared to the previous round but rather increased their votes in competition with others. Initial results from the parliamentary elections in Tehran indicated that the reformists' list had won the elections, and reformist supporters voted in a list format. This was not surprising to observers, as it was expected that the coalition of reformist movements and those close to Rouhani's government would achieve such success, but the presence of Haddad Adel among this strange list seemed odd and could not be easily explained. One explanation for this event is the repetition of the sixth parliament story, where the Guardian Council invalidated 700,000 votes to eliminate Alireza Rajai and elevate Haddad Adel. More strangely, his sudden drop to rank 31 in the subsequent vote announcement can only be explained by the wrestling of power factions. The political identity has become disordered in the tenth Assembly elections; the lists, especially the one known as the reformists, no longer had their former identity, and the boundary between reformists and principlists collapsed. Reformists had greater success in areas where the political bipolarity was more evident. On the other hand, they were forced to include some members of the rival faction in their lists to show the leadership and military that they did not want to create a bipolar situation. When election observers are candidates themselves, the critical faction's hand must naturally tremble. Many analysts and domestic and foreign media, after the announcement of the Assembly of Experts results in Tehran, referred to Hashemi's list, most of whose members entered this Assembly, as the reformists or moderates. It is very interesting that those who have been involved in human rights violations and the repression of Iranian citizens for three decades (such as Mohammad Mohammadi Reyshahri and Ghorbanali Daryaei Najafabadi) are labeled reformists or moderates. The other members of this list are also representatives of Khamenei and protectors of a regime of discrimination, hatred, and violence. Even Hashemi Rafsanjani, who has been critical of some of Khamenei's policies for a few years - and not of the Islamic Republic - and during his presidency, assassinations continued, political activists were arrested and tortured, and corruption was widely known, was introduced to society as a hero of moderation and reform. This change of names and titles also seems astonishing.