Iran: elections or referendum?
However, the record abstention on 31 June proves otherwise. Resistance units belonging to the organised opposition across Iran controlled more than 14,000 polling stations by midnight, clearly demonstrating that at least 88% of Iranians had boycotted the elections. It should be noted that voting is compulsory for soldiers, prisoners and others. Therefore, in elections organised by the Iranian regime, blank ballots often come first or second in certain cities or districts. Last May, resistance units estimated citizen turnout in the legislative elections at 8 per cent, despite all the limitations.
Referendum for the umpteenth time
Had we not seen the Iranian people's vote during the 2019 uprising, in which, according to Reuters, at least 1,500 young people were killed by direct fire on Ali Khamenei's personal orders during their quest for freedom; and had we not observed the 2022 popular uprising, which Ali Khamenei temporarily suppressed only through unprecedented massacres and torture, these elections, however, have once again highlighted the real vote of the Iranian people. Far from being a choice between different candidates, this vote confirms, once again and in its own way, the Iranian people's preference for another secular and democratic regime instead of the current religious dictatorship. This referendum rejects the entire regime.
This was confirmed by the tens of thousands of Iranians who demonstrated in Berlin the day after the Iranian presidential elections, who wanted to be the strong voice of the Iranian people in Europe calling for change.
The next president, whoever he or she is, will follow Khamenei's strategy. He will serve and continue to serve Khamenei's nuclear weapons programme. Assessments published before the elections by institutions linked to the regime indicated that the candidate Saïd Jalili would eventually win in the polls. The presence of Massoud Pezeshkian, a supposed reformist, in the presidential race was nothing more than a manoeuvre to increase the number of participants in the elections, as the Supreme Leader had hoped in his speech two days earlier. Ali Khamenei had not hesitated to add with excessive pride that he would not accept the slightest sign of disagreement with him.
And how naïve, even stupid, it is to believe that someone like Pezeshkian, after four decades of service to the regime, could breach this wall of four decades of repression and introduce a corner of democracy.
Politics of complacency encourages the regime
Despite the wishes of the Iranian people, Western governments persist in their policy of complacency towards the moribund regime. In the US, decisions have been taken to transfer more than 100 billion dollars of Iranian assets to the regime's treasury, facilitating the sale of oil to fund the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and its proxy forces in the region, and to support its warmongering.
In Belgium, under public pressure following the taking of a Belgian citizen hostage in Iran, the government last year handed over a terrorist diplomat to the Iranian authorities. He had been sentenced to 20 years in prison for carrying a bomb capable of killing hundreds of people to an opposition rally in Paris in 2018.
In Sweden, despite a court having sentenced an executioner implicated in the massacre of thirty thousand political prisoners in 1988 to life imprisonment, the government handed him over to the mullahs' regime last month to be received in Tehran with great pomp and circumstance, garlanded around his neck. Once again, the policy of holding a Swedish diplomat hostage in Iran has worked.
In Paris, in order to satisfy the Iranian regime's demands for the release of the hostages, four pages of the newspaper Le Monde were filled with lies and slander against the Resistance, an article widely republished and applauded by the Iranian Intelligence Ministry's websites.
In her opening speech at the annual Iranian Resistance conference in Paris, held simultaneously with the Iranian diaspora demonstration in Berlin, and in the presence of many high-ranking officials from Western countries, Maryam Rajavi, leader of the Iranian Resistance, addressed governments that continue to be lenient towards the Iranian regime: "You have helped this regime move closer to the nuclear bomb, you have paved the way for Khamenei's warmongering in the region, and you have so emboldened the mullahs that they have provoked protests in Ukraine. For years, your media have propagated the lie that religious fascism has no alternative and that we have to make do with it. However, maintaining this dying regime and preventing its inevitable downfall is impossible".