Iran is scrambling to boost turnout ahead of legislative elections on March 1, but calls on voters to show up to the polls may be falling on deaf ears as Iranians grapple with an ailing economy, growing political distrust and a quashed protest movement.
Some 15,000 candidates are competing for the 290-seat parliamentary election, and 144 are running for the 88 seats of the Assembly of Experts, which has the power to appoint the Supreme Leader, the highest political authority in Iran.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is more than 84 years old, and so this incoming Assembly will select his successor if he dies during the body's eight-year term.
Voter turnout is expected to be at record lows, however, with candidates opposed to the current hardline government disqualified amid a widespread crackdown on dissent, which rights groups say only intensified after the 2022 protest movement sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody.
"No, I will not vote," a 23-year-old Iranian woman told CNN from Tehran. "They (elections) take place as a show and propaganda, and, in my opinion, participating in such events is being complicit and helping their political propaganda," she said, asking to be quoted anonymously for fear of retribution by authorities.
Authorities are nonetheless eager to bring people to the polls, trying to inspire a sense of duty and resistance among Iranians amid Israel's war in Gaza.
Khamenei this month called on Iranians to show up to polling stations, writing on X that "elections are the main pillar of the Islamic Republic." He warned Iranians that their enemy would seek to discourage them from voting, and so casting one's ballot was their responsibility and a form of resistance.
"Everyone should note that fulfilling these duties and responsibilities is an act of jihad in confronting the enemy, because they do not want these duties to be fulfilled," Khamenei was reported as saying in the Tehran Times.
Other officials have directly cited the Gaza war to rally voters ahead of the polling day.
In a speech this month, Hamidreza Moghadamfar, an adviser to the chief commander of the IRGC, said that the "biggest supporters of the massacre of tens of thousands of women and children in Gaza are the same ones who are opposed to the people of Iran voting and are the enemies of democracy."
The rhetoric from officials is "a desperate attempt to bring people out," said Alex Vatanka, founding director of the Iran Program at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC, adding that this is "typical" of Khamenei's time.
Foad Izadi, an associate professor at the University of Tehran's Faculty of World Studies, said that it is not difficult to encourage voting by appealing to national unity against the US and Israel, as most Iranians are outraged by the images of bloodshed pouring out of the Israel-Hamas war.
"A good percentage of these people, the people who don't like the current government in Iran, when they hear an American government official talking about human rights in Iran, they don't accept (it)," Izadi said, adding that they see the West as having lost the right to speak about human rights after letting the carnage in Gaza go on for months.
Israel's war in the enclave, while strongly opposed by many Iranians, may not however sufficiently sway all voters to polling stations.
"The government's incitements, in any shape or form, to vote will not influence the people even if we include the Israel-Gaza war," the 23-year-old woman told CNN. She added that since the government has repeatedly used the Gaza war "for its own propaganda," those who oppose the government but support Palestinians "prefer to be silent on the issue" in order to avoid being seen as supporting authorities' agenda.
'Passivity is itself a choice'
More than 61 million of Iran's 87 million people are eligible to vote next month, according to Iran's Election Supervisory Board.
While few opinion polls have been publicly released ahead of this year's election, the results of those that were made public predict a record low turnout. In a December interview with Iranian state news agency ISNA, Hassan Moslemi Naeini, the head of the state-run Academic Center for Education, Culture and Research, said only 27.9% of respondents in his latest survey said they "will definitely participate in the elections." Meanwhile 36% said there is "no way they will participate in the elections."
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