Introduction

Over recent months, the Islamic regime in Iran has embarked on a fervent campaign to encourage the Iranian nation to engage in the forthcoming parliamentary elections in March 2024, followed by the presidential election in June 2025. This call has been vehemently opposed by all opposition factions, both collective and individual, including Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi (Reza Shah II), who famously labelled it a 'circus election'. This term was coined in Persian by this author 27 years ago during the Khatami election and has since been consistently used in subsequent elections through various articles, urging Iranians not to participate in the regime's electoral processes.[[2]] However, in response, the Iranian nation has united behind a boycott of both elections, gaining support even from transitional sectors of the regime, notably the religious sector, who blame the regime for destroying Islam in Iran, particularly as a majority of Iranians after the 45 years of Islamic rule, have turned their back on Islam, with many embracing atheism, reverting to their ancestral Zoroastrian religion, or converting to Christianity.

 

The regime initially employed a range of draconian measures to compel Iranians to participate in the electoral process, resorting to tactics marked by intimidation and the dissemination of fear throughout the nation. This authoritarian approach included the propagation of narratives insinuating that abstention from voting could potentially incite conflict with Western powers, while also casting non-participants as adversaries of Islam and apostates against divine decree. However, confronted with the evident failure of these coercive methodologies to elicit desired compliance, the regime shifted its modus operandi towards a more conciliatory strategy, characterised by invitations, entreaties, and even supplications directed at the nation.

 

Now, the perplexing question arises: why does the Islamic regime, renowned as one of the most autocratic totalitarian entities globally, which has no regard for the Iranians, and imprisons and executes anyone voicing any objection to its oppressive rule, fervently seek the participation of its people in the impending presidential election? Especially considering that elections are a fundamental principle of democratic societies, and the Islamic regime is literally on the opposite side of that spectrum? Notably, the regime's spiritual leader is not elected by the people but appointed by a religious body known as the Guardians Council, wherein all members are self-appointed, resembling an exclusive assembly of mullahs. Furthermore, all 290 MPs and 88 members of the influential Assembly of Experts, including all of the regime’s appointed presidents, undergo well-contextualised filtering by the Council of Guardians. This council holds the authority to accept or reject candidates at their discretion, without providing any explanation for their decisions. Additionally, candidates must receive endorsement from the regime's spiritual leader to be considered for office.

 

However, to address the intriguing query, the regime's emphasis on achieving high voter turnout serves multiple strategic objectives, a commonality shared among all oppressive and dictatorial regimes that frequently endeavour to present themselves as democratically elected governments.

 

 

Legitimacy and Deception

Firstly, Islamic regime in Iran as a theocratic authoritarian entity masquerading as democratic, the regime endeavours to maintain an illusion of popular legitimacy to bolster both domestic and international credibility. By showcasing well-contextualised voter engagement, the regime aims to validate its rule and deflect scrutiny surrounding its authoritarian practices. Moreover, elections afford a semblance of choice, enabling the regime to portray itself as responsive to the will of the people within tightly controlled parameters. This charade of democracy serves to mollify internal dissent and mitigate external criticism, while providing a sanctioned avenue for political expression that channels dissent away from challenging the regime's authority directly. Additionally, the regime utilises elections to perpetuate its legitimacy, portraying itself as a legitimate governing body entrusted with safeguarding the nation's interests.

 

The Islamic regime’s electoral performances must be understood not merely as political deception, but as a deliberate mobilisation of cultural idioms rooted in Iran’s religious and theatrical traditions. What the regime stages every four years is not an election but a grotesque fusion of ta'zieh, siah-bāzi, and ru-howzi theatre, forms historically intended to reflect spiritual allegory or comic relief, now bastardised into tools of state manipulation. The ballot box becomes the final prop in a farce where clerical clowns sermonise about divine legitimacy, while ideological beasts of burden trample over civic reason.

 

The regime’s audience is not invited to vote but to perform subjugation. Citizens are summoned not as autonomous agents, but as ritual participants in a theatre of humiliation. Like actors bound by a script not their own, they are coerced to play the part of loyal subjects, to mouth the language of consent even as their voices are silenced.

 

What emerges is a political choreography designed to empty participation of its meaning. The spectacle disfigures Iran’s cultural memory, desecrating its Zoroastrian and imperial past, replacing national continuity with clerical pastiche. This is not simply political misrule, it is civilisational sabotage. It hollows out identity, decapitates tradition, and replaces historical consciousness with ideological performance.

 

Thus, the regime's insistence on voter participation serves as a dual-purpose tool for legitimisation and control, enabling it to maintain the veneer of democracy while consolidating its authoritarian grip on power. Despite the evident contradictions and absence of genuine electoral choice, the regime continues to emphasise the importance of voting to preserve its survival.

 

 

Control and Rhetorical Strategy

Secondly, the regime exploits electoral outcomes as a pretext for quashing dissent and suppressing uprisings deemed contrary to its interests. In contexts where citizens face unpalatable options or rigged electoral processes, the regime leverages the facade of popular support to justify repressive measures. By purporting to act in accordance with the 'will of the people,' even if coerced or manufactured, the regime seeks to legitimise its authoritarian actions while delegitimising opposition voices. Any dissent or protest can swiftly be branded as illegitimate, framed as an affront to the electoral process and the purported democratic will of the nation.

 

Moreover, the regime utilises the perception of a 'popular mandate' to justify extreme measures, such as arbitrary arrests, extrajudicial killings, and mass repression. By portraying dissenters as enemies of the state and underminers of the electoral process, the regime rallies public opinion against them to consolidate its power base.

 

What we are witnessing in 2024 is not a new phase, but a familiar choreography. For over four decades, the Islamic regime has deployed a cyclical logic of manufactured crisis and selective liberalisation to simulate political dynamism while preserving clerical absolutism. The same charade is now being revived under different names and marginally adjusted costumes. First, the people are brutalised into despair; then a few regime-aligned voices emerge as ‘dissenters’, offering false hope of reform. When the trap is set, the regime permits a slight loosening, controlled debates, filtered candidates, gestures of tolerance, until the population is lured once again into electoral participation. The moment legitimacy is secured, the door slams shut, and repression resumes with renewed confidence.

 

This is not reform. It is sedation. It is not opposition. It is choreography. We saw it with Khatami, whose staged impotence was repackaged as victimhood. We saw it with Rouhani, who mouthed the grammar of détente while the prisons filled and the executions accelerated. And we see it now in the parade of approved ‘moderates’, each posturing as saviour while remaining wholly subordinate to the unelected clerical core.

 

These cycles are not accidental. They are regime technologies. False hope is deployed not despite the regime’s authoritarian structure, but because of it. When international pressure mounts or domestic anger boils over, the regime releases a pressure valve: a new president, a new promise, a new ‘red line’. But the architecture remains unchanged. The Supreme Leader remains untouchable. The IRGC remains unaccountable. The Guardian Council remains the gatekeeper of all political life.

 

Every act of participation in this script, even under protest, is ultimately absorbed into the regime’s narrative of endurance. The tragedy is not only that the regime repeats itself. It is that we, the people, are forced to repeat our disillusionment, again and again, until repetition itself becomes the mechanism of despair.

 

In this manner, the regime weaponises the electoral process not only to maintain power but also to stifle dissent and justify human rights violations. The alleged endorsement of the people becomes carte blanche for the regime to crush opposition, regardless of its legitimacy or justification.

 

 

Refuting the Regime’s False Dilemmas

The regime and its apologists are fond of presenting participation as a lesser evil, as if political agency could be salvaged from a rigged spectacle by choosing between 'bad' and 'worse'. But this framing is itself a form of coercion. It assumes legitimacy where there is none, and choice where there is only calibration of repression. Voting under these conditions does not stop harm, it recycles it. To cast a ballot in a theatre where outcomes are engineered, opposition is filtered, and power is unaccountable, is to affirm the system's continuity. It is not a protest. It is participation in one's own political erasure.

 

Some argue that boycotting elections amounts to passivity. But nothing could be further from the truth. Boycott is not the absence of action, it is the assertion of refusal. It strips the regime of its most coveted asset: the illusion of consent. The Islamic regime does not require your conviction; it requires your compliance. It does not demand belief in its project, only your presence in the polling station, so it may count your body among the numbers it will later present as endorsement. To deny it that body is to unmask the emptiness of its claims.

 

Others insist that even a limited opening, however narrow, is worth seizing, as though history might be written through marginal leverage inside a closed system. Yet experience has shown that every so-called reformist presidency has ended not with transformation, but with the reformist’s own retreat into silence, complicity, or victimhood. These figures are tolerated only so long as they perform their role within the regime’s script. The moment they threaten the unelected core, Supreme Leader, IRGC, Guardian Council, they are discarded. Their temporary prominence is not progress. It is camouflage.

 

Still others warn that not voting will lead to international isolation, military intervention, or domestic collapse. But this is the regime’s favourite hostage narrative, rule by fear disguised as caution. It is a politics of blackmail, wherein the citizen is told to participate in tyranny or be blamed for its consequences. Such logic is not patriotism; it is psychological warfare. It seeks not to protect the nation but to protect the regime from the nation.

 

What, then, is to be done? The first act of national recovery must be the mass withdrawal of consent. Not through passive silence, but through explicit, organised boycott. Abstention, when collective and articulated, is not a void, it is a confrontation. It declares that no faction within the regime holds sovereignty, that no vote under its terms can confer legitimacy. It signals to the world that the Iranian people are not subjects of this farce but prisoners of it, and that they reject the prison altogether.

 

 

Fear of Internal Challenges

Thirdly, when faced with low turnout, as observed with the Iranian nation calling for a boycott for the first time in 45 years, the regime is compelled to resort to electoral manipulation. Falsely claiming that millions have participated and declaring the winner as the most popular candidate with tens of millions of votes, but the regime risks exacerbating internal fissures, potentially leading to its collapse from within.

 

The regime harbours apprehensions about threats to its stability, including from within its own power structures. Diminishing voter turnout may signal weakening popular support, posing a notable risk, particularly from influential factions like the Revolutionary Guards or other military leaders who could exploit perceived vulnerabilities to stage a coup or other acts of defiance.

 

Internal power struggles and factional rivalries are rife in autocratic systems like the Islamic regime in Iran. Balancing the interests of various power centres is imperative for the regime to maintain its grip on power. Consequently, low voter turnout may serve as a catalyst for internal dissent or provide a pretext for dissenting factions to exploit vulnerabilities and challenge the regime's authority.

 

Encouraging voter participation demonstrates unity and cohesion within the regime, projecting strength and legitimacy to potential challengers. By rallying support for the electoral process, the regime fortifies its internal defences and pre-empts subversion from within. Moreover, high voter turnout enables the regime to claim a broad mandate from the nation, further legitimising its rule and preemptively undermining dissenting voices.

 

Thus, the regime's insistence on voter participation serves as a multifaceted tool, bolstering both domestic and international legitimacy while consolidating internal control against potential threats. By maintaining the illusion of broad popular support through high voter turnout, the regime forestalls internal challenges and preserves its grip on power.

 

 

The Global Collusion: Manufactured Legitimacy and the Architecture of Indulgence

No tyranny survives on internal repression alone. The Islamic regime’s electoral theatre functions because it is not merely tolerated, but actively instrumentalised by foreign powers eager for strategic continuity under the cloak of ‘moderation’. From Washington to Brussels, and now from Beijing to Moscow, the global order colludes, some through cynical diplomacy, others through craven realpolitik, in laundering the regime’s violence into legitimacy.

 

Western governments, especially, have perfected the art of posturing: sermonising about human rights while embracing the regime's emissaries, cheering each electoral ‘shift’ as a democratic ‘opening’, and celebrating every new president as a ‘moderate’, ‘reformer’, or ‘pragmatist’. These labels are not analytical, they are anesthetic. They convert Iran from a political emergency into a manageable media cycle. As Edward Said warned, the Oriental subject is not known but processed, framed, made narratively digestible for domestic consumption. Elections serve this function: they provide a clean headline, ‘Iran Votes’, while the torture chambers remain footnotes.

 

The regime’s clerics, security men, and their families pass with ease through London, Paris, Frankfurt, and Dubai, unmolested, unchallenged, while exiled patriots are interrogated at consulates, denied visas, or silenced under ‘security concerns’. This is no accident. It is the quiet diplomacy of complicity. Beneath the rituals of multilateralism lies a material infrastructure of indulgence: property portfolios in Mayfair, children's tuition in Swiss boarding schools, and the discreet banking of stolen wealth in jurisdictions where no questions are asked.

 

And it is not merely the West. The East plays its part with matching cynicism, invoking ‘civilisational sovereignty’ while ignoring massacres, treating boycotts as internal squabbles, and repeating the regime’s language of ‘managed democracy’ as though it were analysis. Both blocs, in different idioms, converge in one outcome: the stabilisation of a regime that has destroyed Iran from within.

 

 

Conclusion

 

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The Islamic regime will fall. Whether by exhaustion, by fracture, or by fury, it will collapse under the weight of its own illegitimacy. But the question that remains, acidic and unforgiving, is this: when that hour comes, where will you have stood?

 

Every vote cast in this rigged spectacle is not merely futile; it is injurious. It does not delay catastrophe, it mortgages the future. Each ballot is not a whisper of dissent, but a signature on the regime’s contract of survival. Each mark on that paper, each inked finger, becomes one more digit in the arithmetic of domination.

 

When your children ask why they must bleed to buy back the dignity you surrendered at the ballot box, what will you say? That you feared the worse, and so voted for the bad? That you believed the butcher might wield his cleaver more gently this time?

 

The regime counts on your despair. It feeds on your resignation. It survives by making you complicit in your own degradation. And when its stage play ends in blood, when the theatres of voting become chambers of mourning, the clerics will not weep. They will count. They will count your vote among their victories. They will count your silence among their triumphs.

 

Let no one feign ignorance. Let no one later claim they did not know. Every citizen who approaches the ballot box under this regime does not merely cast a vote, they co-sign a death warrant. Every mark on that paper becomes ink in the regime’s ledger of blood. The son who disappears into Evin or Kahrizak, the daughter dragged from a protest and found broken in a ditch, the student who vanishes after midnight raids, the worker whose body is returned wrapped in state silence, these are not accidents. They are the direct and deliberate consequences of a system made possible by your vote, your participation, your silence.

 

And when the reckoning comes, as it will, it will not arrive as metaphor, but as mass graves and mutilated corpses, disfigured by state cruelty and buried under official lies.

 

You will be made to look upon what your electoral compliance has enabled. No lamentation will suffice. No invocation of ‘lesser evil’ will shield you. You were warned. Not once, but repeatedly. And still you queued. Still you obeyed. Still you summoned the courage to vote, but not to resist.

 

You will search the ruins of your nation, its memory erased, its future exiled, its children silenced beneath concrete and prayer rugs, and you will realise, too late, that you were not choosing between bad and worse. You were legitimising the machine that devours your own. You were feeding the furnace that incinerates the brightest among us. That is the truth you must carry. Not in abstraction, not in history, but in your own hands.

 

There will be no redemption in hindsight. No moral purity in regret. There will only remain a generation torn apart, some slaughtered, others shattered, and a bitter truth inscribed above the ashes: that tyranny endured not by its own strength, but by the cowardice of those who feared refusing it.

 

So let this be the last warning, not whispered but carved in fire: if you vote in this regime’s circus, you do not merely delay freedom, you murder its possibility. You do not protect the nation, you betray it. And when your grandchildren ask why Iran was lost, you will not be able to speak, for your voice will be buried beneath the votes you cast, the silences you kept, and the complicity you denied until it was far too late.

 

Do not be counted. Do not lend your name, your presence, your illusion, to the ritual of humiliation. Do not offer this regime one more day of false mandate, one more hour of borrowed breath. Refuse now, or watch others die for the truth you would not speak.

 

 

References:

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2005) ‘The Islamic Regime’s Electoral Circus: Why No Iranian Should Lend It Legitimacy’, suren-pahlav.com (08 June). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/hijacked-revolution-stolen-hopes-proxy-dissents-israel-mek-r2p-trap.html [Accessed: 27 February 2024].