Word: reformists
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President Bush may have urged Iranians to boycott Friday?s parliamentary election, but even the reformist factions who saw some 700 of their candidates disqualified by the Guardian Council are urging their supporters to vote. (They're still competing for around 100 of the 290 seats in the majlis, or legislature.) Many of those disqualified had once been considered khodi, or insiders, and include former ministers, governors and MPs, and heroes of the fight against the Shah or the Iran-Iraq war. Those barred from running even included two grandsons of the Islamic Republic's iconic founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini...
...Similarly, the symbolic figurehead of the reformist movement, former President Mohammad Khatami, called on Iranians to "Participate, though submissively, but with joy!" The reformists' expressed rationale is that the only other options are either another revolution, or a foreign invasion - and, like most other Iranians inside Iran, they reject both out of hand. "You see we have no choice. We're choosing the best way forward from a number of bad options," says Tajzadeh...
...reformist, Khatami?s younger brother and a former MP, Mohammad Reza Khatami, even went so far as to tell a newspaper, "We participate in order to save the country." Reformist strategists believe that if all political branches fall into nearly unanimous conservative hands, the split between society and government will become so pronounced as to risk "an undesired social explosion," says Tajzadeh...
...problem is that hopelessness has overtaken society," says Maziar Aghazadeh, a spectacled activist in the reformist Iran Youth Party, now in charge of campaign advertising for the United Reformists Coalition. "Our responsibility is to get the youth of this country interested in politics again," he adds between phone calls. "Our election slogan is 'Join our path, dear, because this common pain won't be healed separately.' And what we tell young people is that we have no choice but to participate. If we don't despair, eventually, not in these majles elections, but eventually, we will win, because our numbers...
...speech that Lee Myung Bak, the new President of South Korea, gave at his inauguration on Feb. 25 was forgivable. "In the shortest period of time," Lee said, "this nation achieved both industrialization and democratization." Visiting bustling Seoul a few weeks ago to meet Lee - who was a reformist mayor of the city before he won the presidency - I was struck, as I always am in Korea, by the extraordinary story of a nation that, impoverished and ravaged by a cruel war, managed to turn itself within a generation into one of the world's most dynamic economies. Even better...