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Iran's "Virtual Democracy" at a Turning Point

Jahangir Amuzegar, former finance minister of Iran, is an international economic consultant based in Washington, D.C. He is a former faculty member of the Paul H. Nitze School for Advanced International Studies of the Johs Hopkins Universityand a frequent contributor to SAIS Review. H Seyyed Mohammad Khatami’s upset victory in Iran’s 1997 presidential election was widely interpreted as the reflection of popular yearnings for change. It was also seen as a clear sign of the “revolution fatigue” caused by eighteen years of revolutionary excesses, civil rights violations, and intolerable puritanical restrictions imposed by a theocratic oligarchy on the people’s daily life. By lineage, training, revolutionary involvement, family ties, and government service, Mohammad Khatami is a solid clerical establishment figure. He is no iconoclast. In fact, his presidential ambition has not been to end the Islamic regime, but to save it. He wants to show the world that Islam and democracy can coexist. Even though the expected change was for continuity’s sake, his election was greeted as a good omen for establishing a kinder and gentler Islam. More pointedly, he won his stunning victory over a powerful and leading conservative rival on the strength of a highly attractive reform agenda: to enforce the rule of law and promote civil society at home, to improve diplomatic relations with the outside world, and to revive and restructure the ailing economy. Khatami’s success in holding the first ever municipal council elections in early 1998, when his supporters and independent candidates won the majority of council seats, raised further hopes for the success of his reform agenda. And the two rounds of the February-May 2000 nationwide parliamentary elections, in which reformist candidates won a landslide victory over the hard-line Iran’s “Virtual Democracy” at a Turning Point