With just a few days until the Iranian presidential elections, regime officials are terrified of a low voter turnout, with state media admitting that 90% of students are not going to vote.
The presidential debates only increased the problems because candidates spent their time accusing one another of stealing from and lying to the Iranian people. For instance, former vice president Mohsen Mehralizadeh brought up the crackdown on the November 2019 uprising to attack judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi, while former Central Bank Governor Abdolnaser Hemmati acknowledged that public dissatisfaction may lead to a widespread election boycott. Expediency Discernment Council member Mohammad Hashemi Rafsanjani even acknowledged that the debates mean nothing and even hurt the candidates.
Throughout all this, the Iranian public has been calling on their fellow citizens to boycott the election. This includes the mothers of those killed during the 2019 uprisings, who’ve posted many videos to social media with these calls.
Iran Alahyari, who is the mother of martyr Mehrdad Moinfar, said: “I will not forgive nor forget the blood of my only son. They have destroyed my life and I have suffered so much pain. Because of the pain of all mothers and fathers like myself, I will not vote. My vote is regime change.”
But this is not as simple as boycotting one election, it is a rejection of the whole system with many openly calling for the overthrow of the regime and supreme leader Ali Khamenei, bolstered by the activism of the Resistance Units, who’ve been campaigning for the boycott since April with the clear message: “My vote is regime change, boycott regime sham elections.”
On June 11, the IRNA news agency acknowledged how vast and successful the campaign was after talking to Taft Friday prayer Imam Ali Mohammad Golverdi, who was worried about the effect this might have on the public.
Khamenei is scared of losing power and is doing everything possible to get his preferred candidate Raisi into office, but the people are denouncing them both. (Raisi was a key figure in the 1988 massacre of 30,000 political prisoners.) The people have been ripping down posters and setting them alight, which became such a problem that the poster campaign ended early.
The Iranian Resistance wrote: “The Iranian people utterly hate Raisi, but that doesn’t mean they have a preference for any of the other candidates. As far as the people are concerned, anyone who is qualified to run for the presidency in Iran is complicit in the regime’s human rights violations, terrorism, and corruption.”
