Turnout that can turn the tables

Iran's urban middle class is increasingly disenchanted with the present government and may turn out in larger numbers than four years ago to oppose President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, voters in Tehran have said in interviews.

In 2005, many of Tehran's 12 million residents boycotted the presidential election to protest a system they thought did not represent them.

But many say they are going to vote against Ahmadinejad now.

“I never voted for anybody because I don't like this system,'' said Faranak, a housewife in Tehran who asked not to be identified.

“But this time, I will bring my family to vote for one of the opponents of Ahmadinejad.''

Leili Rashidi, a well-known Iranian actress, said four more years of Ahmadinejad would be disastrous.

“The middle class is decaying under this government,'' she said. Rashidi said she considers it her duty to try to cause change. “We should vote Ahmadinejad out, or we will be lost.''

Others who normally shy away from politics, including artists, athletes and academics, have joined Rashidi in speaking at campaign rallies, urging people to vote.

Seventy per cent of Iran's population lives in cities and urban voters generally support candidates who promise expanded rights, more personal freedoms and better relations with other nations.

‘We will vote him out'

“We want Ahmadinejad to go,'' said Tina, a 21-year-old engineering student, speaking outside a sandwich shop in a northern Tehran neighbourhood. Neither she nor her friends have ever voted in an election, she said.

“But Ahmadinejad has made the lives of people in the cities miserable. So now all of us will vote and we will vote him out.''

The complaints from the middle class appear rooted in several causes. Thousands of experienced managers working for state companies and government ministries were replaced by Ahmadinejad's supporters.

At the same time, Iran's entrepreneurs, who make up about 20 per cent of the economy and provide many jobs in the cities, were hurt by an influx of Chinese goods.

During Ahmadinejad's term, inflation has run to nearly 30 per cent and the cost of housing in the capital has doubled.

“The middle class, which didn't vote four years ago, has now felt what a calamity has befallen it. I don't think the people are as stupid to repeat their error,'' Rashidi said on her way to shoot a campaign film for the president's main challenger, former prime minister Mir Hossain Mousavi, who seems to be gaining momentum.

Nightmares of war with the United States have haunted her in recent years, Rashidi said, and she could no longer keep quiet. “These elections are our chance for a better future,'' she said.

Appealing to city voters, Mousavi and the other significant challenger, cleric Mahdi Karroubi, have said that, if elected, they would stop the morality police patrols, which are intensely disliked. The patrols began operating in major cities after Ahmadinejad's election.

Stationed at the entrances to shopping malls and busy streets, they have detained thousands of women for wearing what they consider improper Islamic dress.

Tehran women with a taste for dressing out of the ordinary were taken to the police station for wearing boots over their trousers or showing too much hair from under their obligatory headscarves.

“Now there is an atmosphere of fear because of these patrols,'' Tina said as she took money from her black leather Gucci handbag to buy a chicken sandwich.

“During the previous president, we never had such fears,'' she said, referring to Mohammad Khatami, a hugely popular leader who implemented social freedoms during his 1997 to 2005 term.

He now backs Mousavi. Ahmadinejad's opponents are campaigning fiercely in Tehran and other major urban centres.

“If Ahmadinejad wins again, there will be great hopelessness, especially if many people decide to turn out,'' said Nasim Anvari, waiting for Mousavi to arrive at the airport in Tabriz, Iran's fourth-largest city and a major trade hub.

“We have many problems in Iran. We need educated people to solve them.

"Thank God we have good candidates to choose from; there are no excuses this time,'' she said.

Ahmadinejad, a populist who has relied on the poor and working class for his political base, has been handing out cash, and even potatoes, in backwater areas where presidents have not campaigned before.

Justice and focus

“Our government has from the very beginning shown that it does not see the whole of Iran as Tehran,'' presidential adviser Ali Reza Zaker Isfahani said during a speech in the provincial town of Ardel, according to the semi-official Fars news agency.

“The policies were based on justice and focus away from the metropolises. Ahmadinejad has tried to spend the budget for the weak all over Iran,'' he said.

In the 2005 vote, Ahmadinejad won on the second ballot. Of the 46 million eligible voters, more than half stayed home, making it relatively easy for him to win the necessary 50 per cent. “God willing, the people will participate in the elections in large numbers,'' Mousavi told a crowd of more than 30,000 people in a Tabriz football stadium.

As he stepped onstage with his wife, Zahrah Rahnavard, a former university dean, thousands screamed his name. “If we use this never-ending power of the people, we can get our rights,'' Mousavi said.

Ahmadinejad, with his trademark worker's coat, scruffy beard and confrontational remarks, seems a world away from Iran's middle and upper classes, who pride themselves on their refinement.

Urban culture has become much more dominant, said Nasser Fakohi, a professor of anthropology at the University of Tehran.

“Ahmadinejad, for city people, does not embody the social status that many people want to achieve.''