‘It was always the pigs who put forward the resolutions. The other animals understood how to vote, but could never think of any resolutions of their own.’

— George Orwell, Animal Farm

 

 

Introduction

Iran has been reduced to a football, kicked back and forth between the regime's competing factions under the guise of a spectacle grotesquely labelled ‘elections’. The primary function of this electoral circus [1] is neither political accountability nor democratic expression. Rather, it serves two distinct yet intertwined purposes: to deceive the international community and to pacify the Iranian people with the illusion of political agency. Staged every four years, this charade mesmerises the public with its orchestrated theatrics, all the while ensuring the clerical regime retains its stranglehold on power. As the late Shah of Iran astutely warned, this manipulated trajectory is designed to steer Iran towards a dystopian 'Iranestan' (fragmented Iran), governed by foreign proxies and clerical subservience (Suren-Pahlav, 2000).

 

Present evidence suggests that the administration of al-Seyyed [1] Mohammad Khatami is nearing its final chapter. The symbolic football must now be passed to the conservative bloc, which is likely to retain it for the next eight years before handing it back to the so-called ‘reformists’, or more accurately, the ‘false opposition’, in an endless loop of orchestrated power-sharing. Within this rigged schema, the predetermined outcome of the upcoming performance is already manifest: the defeat of Hashemi Rafsanjani and the ascent of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidency, handpicked and anointed in advance by al-Seyyed Ali Khamenei. Yet, tragically, a significant segment of our people continue to nourish the delusion that adding a spoonful of yoghurt to the ocean might somehow turn it into yoghurt drink.

 

Beyond the scripted nature of this electoral farce lies a more sinister calculus. Khamenei’s position as the regime’s Vali-ye Faqih (Supreme Leader), a position architected by none other than Rafsanjani himself, is under threat. In response, Khamenei’s faction is intent on neutralising its former ally by any means necessary. It is entirely plausible that, following Rafsanjani’s choreographed defeat, the regime will fabricate criminal charges against him. The endgame is chillingly predictable: imprisonment, followed either by death in custody or elimination through less traceable means, with official narratives asserting that he succumbed to ‘natural causes’.

 

In this high-stakes power struggle, Khamenei’s reliance on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is both strategic and existential. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, with his origins in the IRGC and his tenure as a security operative in the Kurdistan province, is the ideal figure to advance Khamenei’s consolidation of power. Ahmadinejad enjoys not only the support of the security establishment but also significant favour among its ranks, positioning him as the regime’s preferred executor of repression and continuity.

 

To cast a vote under such circumstances is not a political act, but a betrayal of conscience. It is a submission to the ritualised performance of despotism, cloaked in the language of choice. In such a theatre, participation does not empower, it legitimises.

 

In any case, there is little reason to expect that an Ahmadinejad presidency would differ in any substantive sense from the Khatami era. Iran should instead be expected to continue its regressive descent towards destruction, the very trajectory for which this regime was installed and sustained by foreign powers. Yet, even for the sake of argument, a brief examination of Ahmadinejad’s record during his tenure as Mayor of Tehran allows one to anticipate with some confidence the contours of his presidency [2]. Under his rule, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps would not merely consolidate but fully monopolise political, economic and military power. Iranian society, already burdened by repression and deprivation, would be driven further into misery and despair. During his presidency, corruption would intensify, retrograde religious dogmatism would enter a new and more aggressive phase, and the political atmosphere would become even more suffocating than before.

 

Accordingly, the Rafsanjani faction, together with the entirety of the so-called reformist bloc within the state apparatus, will attempt to frighten the Iranian public into submission. By warning that failure to vote will result in an even darker future, they will endeavour to coerce people into participating in the electoral circus. Eight years of dictatorial rule under Khatami, combined with widespread disillusionment and the false hope of ‘genuine reform’, will unfortunately assist in dragging sections of the population once more towards the ballot boxes.

 

If, however, the Iranian people are truly exhausted by the present condition and seek fundamental change for themselves and their country, such change is attainable only through the overthrow of the regime. The first and most immediate step in this direction is the refusal to participate and the active boycott of the forthcoming sham elections.

 

 

Questions and answers

Question 1: If elections are meaningless, why does the Islamic regime insist on holding them?

Because the regime needs the theatre, not the vote. Elections are not a mechanism of accountability but a technology of survival. The Islamic regime does not organise elections in order to submit itself to popular judgement. It stages elections in order to transform domination into a national ritual and then export that ritual as ‘legitimacy’. The ballot box is merely the final prop in a production whose script has already been approved by unelected power. Candidates are filtered, rivalries are choreographed, and the electorate is summoned not as a sovereign citizenry but as an obedient crowd assembled for inspection (Human Rights Watch, 2005).

 

This is why turnout matters more than outcome. The regime’s true demand is not for political choice, but for public participation in its own propaganda. A nation forced into the polling station becomes a population conscripted into the state’s narrative of consent. The regime cannot rule by persuasion, so it rules by performance. And when performance fails, it returns to its native language: fear, intimidation, and the manufactured terror of what will happen if the people refuse to play their assigned role.

 

Question 2: But surely voting is better than letting the hardliners win?

This argument is the regime’s favourite hostage note. It assumes a choice between two futures, when only two masks of the same face are being offered. The Theocratic apparatus is not a pluralist system in which competing political programmes contend for power. It is an authoritarian structure in which factions compete over the management of repression and the distribution of patronage.

 

The so-called ‘reformist’ is tolerated only so long as he remains a form of ‘false opposition’ and does not threaten the regime’s unelected core: the Supreme Leader’s supremacy, the security state’s impunity, and the clerical right to veto the people’s will. When the regime’s propagandists claim ‘vote to stop the worst’, they reveal the truth they seek to conceal: the system is engineered to trap the nation between calibrated forms of harm.

 

Question 3: Isn’t boycott passive? What does it achieve?

Boycott is not passivity. It is refusal. It is the rejection of a script written by the oppressor and performed in the victim’s name. In a normal polity, participation is a civic right. Under clerical absolutism, participation becomes political labour performed for the state. Voting here is not a choice of representative. It is the production of a number that will be broadcast as proof that the people have spoken, even when the people have been gagged, filtered, and surveilled.

 

The regime does not fear the vote because it counts it. It fears withdrawal because it exposes the emptiness behind the spectacle. Boycott deprives the propaganda machine of its most valuable export: turnout. Without turnout, the regime loses the image it sells abroad and the psychological submission it demands at home (Human Rights Watch, 2005).

 

Question 4: If the Guardian Council vets candidates, why not vote anyway, at least to send a message?

Because the message will be edited before it reaches the world. The regime’s Guardian Council is not an administrative body. It is an ideological border patrol. It exists precisely to ensure that no genuine opposition reaches the ballot paper. Voting under these conditions is not a ‘message’. It is a stamp of approval on a rigged process.

 

The regime will not hear protest. It will record compliance. A vote cast as a whisper of dissent will be broadcast as a shout of loyalty. This is the regime’s genius: it converts the citizen’s most basic democratic gesture into evidence of submission.

 

Question 5: Haven’t reformists created openings through elections in the past?

If by ‘openings’ one means temporary loosening, cosmetic adjustment, and short-lived cultural breathing space, then yes, at times the regime has permitted the illusion of movement. But these are not reforms. They are pressure valves, tactical retreats designed to prevent strategic collapse and to prolong the life of the system through a carefully managed ‘false opposition’. Every time the hopes of reformist supporters approach the regime’s red lines, the state responds with veto, purge, intimidation, and the quiet violence of institutions that answer to nobody (Middle East Research and Information Project, 2004). Then the reformist leadership performs victimhood, declares itself ‘blocked’, and occupies the minds of its supporters for the next four years, recycling frustration into renewed electoral participation. This is not reform. It is political sedation. This is the mechanism of false opposition.

 

A brighter prison is still a prison. The regime is not loosening its grip, it is adjusting the lighting so the captives stop screaming.

 

Question 6: Isn’t voting a patriotic duty? Don’t Iranians owe it to Iran to participate?

Iran is not the Islamic regime. The nation is not the state that has occupied it. Patriotism is not obedience to a regime that treats citizenship as a conditional privilege. The language of ‘duty’ is itself part of the coercion. A state that crushes unions, censors the press, murders dissidents, and weaponises the judiciary has no moral authority to demand ‘duty’ from its victims.

 

Voting under tyranny is not patriotism. It is participation in political dispossession. The only civic duty that survives under despotism is the duty to refuse lies spoken in the nation’s name.

 

Question 7: What if Iranians do not vote and the regime claims victory anyway?

Of course it will claim victory. It claims victory over the dead. It claims victory over prisons it denies exist. It claims victory over crimes it no longer even bothers to hide. The issue is not whether the regime will lie, but whether it will be handed the raw material for its lies.

 

Private abstention can be erased. Collective refusal cannot be so easily buried. Boycott must therefore become national, organised, and explicit. The regime is skilled at manufacturing narratives. The task is to deny it the numbers with which those narratives are manufactured.

 

Question 8: Does the international community not see through this charade?

As Edward Said argues, media narratives routinely package the non-West through simplifying frames that substitute recognition for knowledge (Said, 1981). The Theocratic apparatus relies on this appetite for a manageable story: elections offer a clean headline, while repression becomes a footnote.

 

Some see it. Many pretend not to. The West often treats Iranian suffering as background noise to its own strategic calculations, then congratulates itself for noticing Iran at election time. Foreign ministries prefer the vocabulary of ‘moderates’ and ‘pragmatists’ because it allows them to do business while preserving the illusion of moral cleanliness. Much of the international media prefers the drama of personalities to the reality of structure. Elections provide headlines that are easy to sell. Repression requires attention, courage, and memory.

 

The Velayatist order relies on that laziness. It thrives on a world that mistakes spectacle for politics and treats controlled participation as proof of legitimacy.

 

And it is not only the West. The East also participates in the manufacture of legitimacy, repeating the language of ‘semi-democracy’ as though it were analysis, while treating the regime’s human rights violations as an inconvenient footnote. In both cases, Iran is not engaged as a political reality, but processed as a strategic file, reduced to a usable narrative. This is not ignorance. It is the production of consent for tyranny, dressed up as pragmatism and presented as expertise.

 

One need only pass through London Heathrow to see how easily the regime’s clerical class and its affiliates move between Tehran and the very capitals that sermonise about ‘moderation’. This is not a diplomatic misunderstanding. It is a material infrastructure of indulgence, a backstage corridor where authoritarian power is quietly normalised.

 

Question 9: If Iranians do not vote, what is the alternative?

The alternative is to stop begging for crumbs from a table built on humiliation. The alternative is delegitimisation, organisation, and the recovery of Iranian political sovereignty. The question is not which faction of the Islamic regime will administer the nation’s suffering, but why an unelected state has any right to rule at all.

 

Boycott is not the final act. It is the first refusal, the clean break from a regime that survives by dragging the population into its rituals. Once the spell of participation is broken, politics becomes possible again: politics rooted in freedom, accountability, and a constitutional order worthy of Iran.

 

 

Legitimacy and Deception

At its core, the Velayatist order functions as an authoritarian theocracy that presents itself to the world as a democratic polity. Its calculated use of elections serves, first and foremost, to fabricate a semblance of legitimacy. By staging electoral rituals, the regime seeks to portray itself as a sovereign authority invested with popular will, thereby laying claim to the responsibility of safeguarding the nation’s interests. Through this performance, it manufactures the illusion of public consent, which in turn bolsters both domestic and international legitimacy, consolidating the regime’s hold on power.

 

Central to this strategy is the projection of high voter turnout. Such displays are instrumental in validating the regime’s rule, distracting from its authoritarian excesses, and shielding its oppressive apparatus from scrutiny. The theatrical nature of these elections, carefully choreographed within tightly controlled parameters, enables the regime to feign accountability while in truth insulating itself from genuine challenge. The rhetoric of democracy is deployed not to empower the citizenry but to pacify internal discontent and deflect international criticism. Simultaneously, it offers a state-sanctioned outlet for political expression designed precisely to disarm dissent and forestall direct confrontation with the regime’s authority.

 

The regime’s insistence on electoral participation is thus a dual mechanism, both a tool of legitimisation and a strategy of manipulation and control. It permits the Islamic regime to maintain the democratic façade necessary for its survival, all the while reinforcing its autocratic grip. Despite glaring contradictions and the absence of any authentic electoral choice, the regime persistently underscores the importance of voting as a matter of existential necessity. This compulsion to vote is not a democratic imperative but a desperate plea for self-preservation cloaked in the language of national duty.

 

 

Mechanisms of Control and Rhetorical Strategy

Secondly, the regime exploits electoral outcomes as a strategic pretext for repressing dissent and neutralising uprisings deemed inimical to its interests. In contexts where citizens are faced with predetermined choices and manipulated electoral processes, the regime leverages public participation as a performative mandate to justify its coercive policies. By framing its actions as expressions of the so-called ‘will of the people’, however engineered or enforced, authoritarian measures are cloaked in democratic legitimacy, while dissenting voices are systematically delegitimised. Any form of protest or opposition can thus be swiftly branded as a transgression against the purported democratic consensus.

 

In this framework, even the most grotesque violations of human rights, arbitrary detentions, extrajudicial killings, and mass repression, are rationalised as extensions of popular will. The regime relies on this rhetorical device, the ‘people’s mandate’, to sanctify its crimes and criminalise its critics. Moreover, by portraying opponents as enemies of the state and saboteurs of the electoral process, it manipulates public opinion, turning the population against its own dissenters and thereby reinforcing the regime’s hegemonic grip.

 

In this way, the electoral process becomes a weapon, not merely to maintain control, but to actively suppress opposition and rationalise state violence. The claim to popular legitimacy functions as a carte blanche for atrocity, divorced entirely from any genuine public consent or moral justification. Every ballot cast, under such conditions, is involuntarily transfigured into an endorsement of repression. Each vote deposited into the ballot box becomes, metaphorically and politically, a bullet in the regime’s rifle, aimed not just at its opponents, but at fellow citizens, even at the voter’s own children.

 

Thus, to participate is not a neutral act. It is, whether wittingly or not, complicity in the perpetuation of tyranny.

 

 

Fear Within the Regime and the Vultures' Feud

Thirdly, the Theocratic apparatus is perennially anxious about threats to its survival, both from the Iranian people and from internal fissures within its own authoritarian apparatus. As with all autocratic systems, internal rivalries, factional strife, and power struggles constitute a permanent feature of governance. In order to preserve its dominance, the regime must continually balance the competing interests of various power centres. When faced with low electoral turnout, or worse, a nationwide boycott, the regime’s immediate instinct is to falsify participation figures, fabricating narratives of mass support and proclaiming victory for a preselected candidate with tens of millions of fictitious votes. This is done not merely to placate foreign observers but, crucially, to forestall internal collapse.

 

Such manoeuvres, however, come at a cost. They erode what remains of the regime’s carefully engineered illusion of legitimacy on the global stage. More dangerously, they signal weakness to the regime’s own power base. Once it becomes evident that the ruling elite no longer commands public loyalty, and that the mirage of legitimacy has evaporated, the spectre of regime change becomes perceptible even within the inner sanctums of power. Crucially, many mid-tier elements of the regime, deeply implicated in its crimes, are acutely aware that, should the Islamic regime fall, they too will face retribution. To pre-empt such a reckoning, they may seek to preserve themselves by instigating a controlled rupture from within: a palace coup, military intervention, or internal purge in which the top leadership is arrested, scapegoated for ‘betraying the people’, and replaced with a ‘refined’ version of the same order.

 

Such a scenario would amount not to real transformation but a cosmetic adjustment designed to salvage the regime’s underlying structure. Those orchestrating it, having long participated in the regime’s machinery of repression, cannot fundamentally change their nature. A telling pattern emerges before every election: a few clerics and regime-aligned preachers suddenly adopt the guise of critics, projecting themselves as voices of conscience. Their purpose is not to side with the people, but to hedge their bets, so that if a popular uprising does occur or a coup is staged, they can distance themselves from the core leadership and escape unscathed. Should the regime survive yet again by luring voters to the ballot boxes, these opportunists promptly fall silent, until the next circus resumes.

 

The push for voter participation, particularly by the so-called reformist camp, also serves to convey a message of internal unity. It is a display intended not for the public per se, but for the regime’s own security establishment, to reassure them that the Velayatist order remains intact and capable of sustaining its hegemony. In short, the regime requires the illusion of electoral engagement to consolidate its internal foundations and pre-empt implosion from within. A high voter turnout strengthens its claim to national mandate, emboldens its demands on the populace, and enables it to suppress dissent more assertively.

 

Thus, the regime’s insistence on participation functions as a multifaceted weapon: to secure its hold on power, to deter internal coups, and to suppress revolutionary momentum. Consequently, if the Iranian people genuinely seek fundamental change, they must boycott these electoral farces and withhold their complicity. To participate is to fortify a regime that has brought only darkness, repression, and despair. To abstain is to strike at its most vulnerable point, the hollow legitimacy it so desperately depends upon. Otherwise, this sorrowful and degrading condition will not only persist but deepen, dragging every citizen, and their children, into a future even bleaker than the past.

 

 

Conclusion

Regrettably, in previous electoral spectacles, many, including this writer, issued repeated warnings that participation in such state-orchestrated farces would do nothing to alter the dire trajectory of Iran's future. Yet it seems, with bitter irony, that a tragic aspect of our national temperament is this: we often require not one, but several blows to the head, devastating and irreversible, before we awaken from delusion, and by then, it is often too late. Only at the final gasp, in the twilight before collapse, do we realise that the future we are careening toward is merely an extension of the past twenty-seven years: a descent into accelerated decay, under a regime that has betrayed the nation at every turn.

 

With each year that this anti-Iranian, clerical regime has clung to power, Iran has sunk deeper into degradation, and the lives of its people into ever darker misfortune. If, today, you withhold action and once again lend your presence to the regime’s counterfeit election, you are not merely delaying change, you are actively enabling the survival of a system that thrives on national suffocation.

 

The day will come, sooner than many imagine, when the point of no return is crossed. When that hour arrives, no lamentation will suffice, and no belated act of defiance will reverse the ruin. There will be no deliverance, neither for yourself, nor for your country. Fellow compatriot: do not test what has already failed. Wake from this self-deceiving slumber before it seals our collective fate.

 

And so, a final warning to my naïve, compliant compatriot: remember this, and remember it without illusion. Every vote cast in these sham elections, every silence in the face of repression, is not mere error. It is complicity. In choosing between the bad and the worse, you lend the regime the very legitimacy it needs to kill. Each vote is a bullet chambered. Each silence, a noose drawn tight around the necks of your own children.

 

The reckoning will not arrive as metaphor. It will come as blood.

 

When your sons and daughters, finding no path but defiance, rise to confront the machinery of tyranny, the very apparatus your vote and your silence entrenched, you will scour the mangled remains of their bodies, torn apart and soaked in blood, buried beneath mounds of martyrs. You will scream their names into the void you helped sustain.

 

And when foreign powers descend, cloaked in the language of human rights but armed with bombs and partition maps, tearing the country limb from limb under the guise of intervention, you will come to understand the true cost of your accommodation: you did not only betray your children. You surrendered yourself. And you delivered your country into ruin.

 

 

Footnotes:

1 – The Islamic regime in Iran institutionalises ‘Seyyed’ privilege , a claimed descent from the Muslims’ prophet, Muhammad, as a state‑sanctioned hierarchy that transcends spiritual distinction to confer tangible political, clerical, and social advantages. This privilege operates as a structural apparatus of discrimination and apartheid rooted in the Arab conquest of Persia, with state law uniquely permitting and recording the ‘Seyyed’ title on official documents. In doing so, it embeds hereditary clerical supremacy within theocratic governance and systematically marginalises non‑Seyyed in Iran. Dismantling this lineage‑based hierarchy is presented as essential for achieving historical justice and civic equality in any future political order in Iran (Suren-Pahlav, 2001).

2 – The term 'Election Circus' was first coined by the British political analyst Dave Brand, who employed it in 1980 to describe the theatrical nature of trade union elections in his essay 'The Principles of Revolutionary Trade Unionism' (Unite!, Vol. 6, No. 19, 15 October 1980). Brand's critique focused on the superficial pageantry of such elections, where the temporary excitement of the spectators masked the deeper reality, that the true beneficiaries were the organisers of the circus, who profited from keeping the crowd distracted and docile. The spectacle, he argued, was never about power redistribution, but about reinforcing the structures of control under the guise of popular participation. This characterisation proves especially apt when applied to the Islamic regime’s so-called presidential elections in occupied Iran. Here, the electoral process functions not as a mechanism of democratic will but as a grotesque pageant, assembled from elements of ta'zieh, vulgar farce, ru-howzi theatre, and siah-bazi, complete with clerical clowns and ideological beasts, all intended to stupefy and deceive the population. The regime orchestrates this spectacle to secure its continuity, to project legitimacy where there is none, and to maintain the illusion of choice under a totalitarian theocracy. Unlike an actual circus, however, where spectators may leave the tent entertained and unharmed, their pockets a little lighter but their lives unaffected, the Islamic circus exacts a far heavier toll. Participation in this fabricated electoral ritual results not in amusement, but in complicity. The spectators in this theatre of cruelty risk becoming fodder for the regime’s security apparatus or emerging from the experience stripped bare, socially, politically, and economically destitute. In this context, the Election Circus becomes not a metaphor, but a precise descriptor of the regime’s machinery of coercion and spectacle.

3 – Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's tenure as Mayor of Tehran, beginning on 3 May 2003, served as an ominous preview of the style of governance he would later bring to the presidency. His earliest measures, including the arbitrary replacement of traffic lights and intersections with baffling U-turn schemes, caused widespread confusion and a spike in road accidents. In a failed publicity stunt, he attempted to shut down Tehran's international exhibition centre, and soon turned his attention to Hamshahri, the city’s flagship newspaper. By installing a new management and injecting it with religious dogma and superstitious themes, he repurposed the publication as a tool of clerical indoctrination. Ahmadinejad’s urban policies reflected a broader assault on Tehran’s cultural fabric. He facilitated the construction of borj-bāghs (luxury high-rise towers in former garden spaces), sanctioned the proliferation of religious ceremonial institutions, particularly those propagating backward rituals like public chest-beating, and aggressively targeted cultural institutions. Declaring cultural centres as dens of moral corruption, he presided over the closure of key spaces such as the House of Theatre, the Theatre Directorate, the Sculpture Academy, and iconic venues like Nasr and Pars Theatres. His tenure culminated in the disappearance of 320 billion tomans from the account of Tehran’s Cultural and Artistic Organisation, an astronomical sum for which neither he nor any other official was held accountable. This record is not a list of bureaucratic failures, it is an indictment of ideological governance rooted in obscurantism, cultural destruction, and unaccountable power. Ahmadinejad’s mayorship laid bare the regime’s contempt for art, thought, and civic life. It was not mismanagement, but a deliberate campaign to hollow out the intellectual and cultural life of the capital, a campaign later scaled to the national level during his presidency.

 

 

References:

• Human Rights Watch (2005) Iran’s Exclusionary Elections: I. Summary and Recommendations. 17 June. Available at: https://www.hrw.org/legacy/backgrounder/mena/iran0605/1.htm [Accessed: 08 June 2001].

• Middle East Research and Information Project (2004) ‘The New Landscape of Iranian Politics’, MERIP, 6 December. Available at: https://www.merip.org/2004/12/the-new-landscape-of-iranian-politics/ [Accessed: 08 June 2001].

• Said, E.W. (1981) Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2000) ‘A Death in Exile, A Nation in Chains: Remembering HIM Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, Shāhanshāh Āryāmehr’, suren-pahlav.com (27 July). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/uncrowned-king-of-kings-of-iran-constitutional-legitimacy-and-the-limbo-of-crown-prince.html [Accessed: 08 June 2001].

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2001) ‘Lineage, Apartheid, and Subjugation: The State-Sanctioned Seyyed Privilege in Iran's Totalitarian-Theocratic Order’, suren-pahlav.com (01 May). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/lineage-apartheid-and-subjugation-the-state-sanctioned-seyyed-privilege-in-iran-s-totalitarian-theocratic-order.html [Accessed: 08 June 2001].