Green shoots

"However this struggle ends," said a perspiring middle-aged woman at the first of the monstrous anti-government demonstrations in Tehran on 15th June, "something in Iran has changed forever." She gestured over her shoulder, back along the broad, sun-baked Azadi Street, at the solid mass of Iranians behind her, marching, chanting and showing the victory sign. This event, many participants said, was easily the biggest show of popular discontent since the Islamic revolution of 1979. Unlike other rallies of recent years—state-sponsored affairs dutifully attended by government employees— this one was illegal, self-policed, and exuberantly good-humoured.

I walked with the marchers for much of the three-mile route. To begin with, concerned to deter possible attacks by armed anti-riot police or members of the Basij—a big, highly ideological force of reservists—nervous-looking organisers husbanded the crowd into compact blocks. Then, as the afternoon wore on, and people kept arriving in their thousands and the slogans grew in wit and ribaldry, so the participants' sense of their own invincibility seemed to increase. As the day ended, vendors of ice cream and faludeh, an Iranian sweet, did brisk business. The crowd, one policeman was quoted as saying, was well over 1m strong. Of the riot police and the feared Basij, there was as yet no sign.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran's president of the past four years, stands accused by these and many other Iranians who took to the streets in the following days, of perverting the presidential election of 12th June, which—so his interior ministry announced—he won by a landslide. For much of a generally lacklustre campaign, Ahmadinejad, a polarising populist admired by many poorer Iranians for doling out loans and handouts, and proclaiming his desire to serve the common man, had been the candidate to beat.



Then, two weeks before the poll, perhaps out of hubris, the president started making mistakes. Having agreed to hold live televised debates with his electoral rivals, itself at odds with the usually decorous facade of Iranian politics, he angered many Iranians by allowing his former, generalised criticisms of corruption in high places to become personalised attacks on the families of his political adversaries. He cast aspersions on the validity of the doctorate held by the wife of his main rival, the former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, and on the probity of the children of two leading clerics. He trumpeted optimistic economic data that was subsequently contradicted by the central bank website. Mousavi accused him of filling the country with "lies and hypocrisy."

Emboldened, Iranians took to the streets of Tehran and other cities in the evenings preceding the election, in such numbers—supported by unofficial opinion polls—as to suggest that Mousavi stood a good chance of winning. When Iranians turned out in droves to vote, the Islamic Republic's credentials as a democracy of sorts shone brightly. For where else in the middle east, except Beirut, can one witness campaigning of such openness, preceding an election whose result is not foregone?

But that idea, if Mousavi's supporters are to be believed, is now shattered. The following day, the interior ministry announced that Ahmadinejad had taken 62 per cent of the vote, or 24m votes, and his main challenger a mere 34 per cent, or 13m. For a great many Iranians, recalling Mousavi's rising popularity in the final days of the campaign, this was hard to believe. The Mousavi camp said that their representatives had been illegally denied access to polling stations across the country. According to interior ministry figures, a second reformist candidate, Mehdi Karroubi, won a risible 1 per cent of the vote (he scored 17 per cent in the first round of the 2005 election) and was crushed by Ahmadinejad even in his home province, an aberration in highly tribal Iran. Mousavi also apparently lost to the president on his home turf.

The 15th June has, of course, turned out to be the first of many demonstrations and protests, most of them called by Mousavi, all of them organised by people close to him, and attended by Iranians of different ages and walks of life. As it began, this did not appear to be a movement with a rigid manifesto, but a disparate coalition united by a desire to be rid of Ahmadinejad. By proclaiming their adherence to the election laws and constitution, and by initially refraining from direct criticism of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khameini, they were able to claim to be upholding the constitution and not, as their opponents charged, undermining it in a "velvet coup."

In Mousavi himself these Iranians have found an unlikely figurehead. As prime minister during the bloody war with Iraq in the 1980s he was regarded as a competent economic manager, but is said also to have taken part in the purging of pro-western elements from universities after the revolution. He mellowed earlier than most, and left office, he told voters during the campaign, when asked to do something "illegal." This time round, he promised competent government, a lowering of tensions with the outside world, and—for young people chafing at moral "guidance patrols" in urban areas—"freedom from fear." Perhaps most important of all, after the election results were announced and he was placed under terrific pressure to endorse Ahmadinejad's victory, he displayed the cussedness of a fighting leader and refused.

This steel, many reform-minded Iranians say, is what they have lacked in a leader since the charming but preternaturally cautious Muhammad Khatami, Iran's sole reformist president to date, was swept to power in 1997, only to be thwarted by a deeply antagonistic conservative establishment. And it is hard to imagine Khatami calling this election a "dangerous charade," as Mousavi dared to, far less encouraging his supporters to take their protests to the street.

Ahmadinejad has likened the protesters to "weeds" and their anger to that of football supporters rooting for the wrong team. But after the strength of the initial protests became clear, Ayatollah Ali Khameini authorised the council of guardians to look into allegations of electoral fraud. Mousavi and the other defeated candidates provided a dossier of evidence of electoral corruption, but seemed doubtful of the willingness of the council, which is ultimately responsible for supervising elections, to thoroughly investigate irregularities. "I am not very optimistic about the [council's] judgement," Mousavi said on 14th June. "Many of its members did not behave impartially during the election and supported the government candidate."

Further violence in the days after the poll put the crisis on a new, more dangerous trajectory. The evening of 15th June, after the pro-Mousavi rally broke up, brought the first officially acknowledged deaths—of seven young people, part of a much larger crowd that was fired upon by Basijis not far from Azadi Square. Many arrests followed in subsequent days. Throughout, the night silence was punctured by cries from the rooftops of "God is Great!" (a slogan also used in the 1979 revolution that had been adopted by Mousavi and his supporters), and by the sound of sporadic clashes between the Basij and their young, increasingly angry opponents. Mourning ceremonies for those killed in the protests are an inescapable accompaniment to death in Shia Iran, and can, as the revolution showed, become an excuse for more violence.

The joyous, celebratory demonstration on 15th June cut across social divides, including young westernised youths, students and much older people, many of them traditional chador-wearing women, and showed the impressive breadth of support behind Mousavi—and, more generally, for a change away from Ahmadinejad and back to a less abrasive, more elegant politics. This desire has existed among many Iranians for some time. That it is has finally found expression with mass action of a kind unseen since the Islamic revolution is confirmation that, yes, something in Iran has changed forever.