Iran is set to have a new, more conservative parliament after the regime disqualified thousands of candidates from running.
The country held its parliamentary elections on Friday, which were marked by domestic dissatisfaction and boycotts. The voting comes after mass protests against the government in November and January, when citizens expressed anger at Iranian leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s government.
“Tomorrow, the Iranian regime will stage an event euphemistically called ‘elections,’” Brian Hook, the top White House adviser on Iran, said at a Thursday press briefing where he announced sanctions against Iranian officials involved in vetting election candidates.
“Unfortunately for the Iranian people, the real election took place in secret long before any ballots were even cast,” Hook added.
In November, hundreds of Iranians were killed in nationwide protests. Another wave of protests swept the country after the regime admitted to shooting down a commercial airliner, killing 176 people on board. Iran’s leaders lied about the crash for days, claiming it was a technical error, before acknowledging that it accidentally fired on the plane and killed the passengers, many of whom were Iranian citizens.
In the days leading up to Friday’s election, Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani urged Iranians to show up to vote despite more than half of the candidates who were trying to run being blocked from doing so because of their more moderate stances toward the West.
The Guardian Council of the Constitution, a 12-member body, has the authority to decide who gets put on the ballots and used its power to reject reformist candidates.
“I beg you not to be passive,” Rouhani said last week.
Online polls conducted this week prior to the election found a large majority of Iranians had no intention of casting a ballot.
The Washington Examiner spoke with an Iranian dissident on Thursday over an encrypted messaging app. Kaveh, who wished to be identified only by his first name for his safety, said calls for boycotting the election have proliferated across Iranian social media.
The 26-year-old student said that many people in the country have “decided not to vote” despite the regime “begging” people to do so.
“I want to say, as always, this election is never [a] real and democratic election,” Kaveh said.
The elections came the same day that the Financial Action Task Force, an organization based in Paris and backed by dozens of countries, sanctioned Iran by placing it on a blacklist over its failure to curb terrorism financing.
In addition to the boycotts and discontent with the candidates, the fear of the coronavirus outbreak might have caused some to stay away. Iran announced two new deaths from the illness on Friday. In total, there have been 18 cases in Iran, so far resulting in four deaths.
Alireza Jafarzadeh is the deputy director of the National Council of Resistance of Iran’s Washington office, a dissident group affiliated with the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq. The group advocates for regime change and has seen hundreds of its members imprisoned and killed.
Jafarzadeh said that the turnout for the elections was “unprecedented” and pointed to the recent protests.
“The unprecedented low voter turnout was the result of two major rounds of nationwide uprisings all over Iran in the past three months, where people had already cast their vote for the overthrow of the regime,” he said in a statement.
The elections come at a time of increased tension between the United States and Iran. In January, the U.S. targeted Iranian military commander Qassem Soleimani and Iranian-backed Iraqi militia leader Abu Mahdi al Muhandis in a Baghdad drone strike. In retaliation for the deaths, Iran launched missiles at Iraqi bases housing American troops, causing brain injuries for dozens.
The final results of Friday’s parliamentary election are expected over the weekend.
