The dark undemocratic cloud hanging over Iran has a silver lining

The Daily Star:

On the eve of Iran's most tightly contested presidential election in history, U.S. President George W. Bush slammed the vote, saying that it is undemocratic. Bush raised a valid point when he suggested that the real authority in the country still lies in the hands of religious establishment, i.e., the hard-line Council of Guardians and ultimately the supreme leader. But despite Bush's criticism of the dark, undemocratic cloud that is looming over the Islamic Republic, Iranians should take heart in the silver lining that has characterized this year's presidential poll. READ MORE

Indeed, this year's presidential campaign has seen a significant shift in language and style. Gone are the days when candidates competed by championing the Islamic Republic's revolutionary ideals and shouting Islamist and anti-American slogans. This year's campaigning was not only more sober, it also focused on the issues that matter to the country's mostly young and reform-minded population, such as what to do about staggering unemployment rates, whether to limit the power of the supreme leader and how to improve relations with the United States.

In the midst of the campaigning fray, most candidates abandoned their conservative rhetoric in order to win the support the public. Hard-line former police chief Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf reinvented himself as a smiling, populist technocrat and adopted campaign slogans such as "education is better than repression" and "not a rightist nor a fundamentalist." Even conservative frontrunner Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani recast himself as a pragmatic moderate who will work to save Iran from "extremist forces" and repair relations with Washington. Conservative candidates seemed to recognize that the only way they could compete in the polls was to tone down their religious rhetoric and speak the language the people desperately want to hear: the language of reform.

This is not to suggest that all is well and democratic in Iran. Gone, too, are the high hopes that Iranians held when they swept reformist President Mohammad Khatami to victory in the last presidential election. Iranians are no longer blinded by the reformist enthusiasm as they were in those days. They have watched with disappointment as the religious establishment blocked nearly all of Khatami's efforts to reform. But although their enthusiasm may have dwindled, the Iranian people have not given up on their dreams for reform.

The change in the political atmosphere may be minor, but it is nonetheless a harbinger of things to come in Iran. Although the structure of the country hasn't changed, the country's presidential contenders are at least beginning to recognize that their public is committed to the idea of reform.