Iran’s political response to COVID has been the worst across the Middle East. This is surprising because Iran in terms of GDP is one of the wealthiest countries in the region. Why has Iran failed to combat the spread of the virus and what does it mean for democracy in Iran?
Credit: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA
Iran is controlled primarily by the religious right, the Ayatollah and the Guardian Council are both parts of the Shia clergy. During the initial outbreak, the regime resisted calls to quarantine and close religious shrines worsening the spread of the disease and embarrassing the government. The handling of the crisis has weakened the regime’s legitimacy and prompted questions of whether this will lead to democratization in Iran as more people begin to reject religious rule.
The Religious Right and the Young Middle Class
The holy city of Qom was the epicenter of the disease in Iran. The inability of the regime to combat the disease has become a public failure. Powerful members of the religious leaders have begun to speak out against the regime including Yusuf Saanei, a former member of the Guardian Council who said in an interview that those who have promoted alternative treatments and rejected public health guidelines are “an inept group who try to cling to sharia”.
Prominent Iranian religious and political figures have also been killed by the disease further shaking the country’s trust in its leadership. Assemblymember, Hashem Bathaei Golpayegani died from the disease in March just a few days after claiming that he had cured himself by eating the soil from the grave of a revered figure in Shiite Islam. This case as well as a few others, has demonstrated to the Iranian people that the government is unable to promptly handle the situation. In May while the country continued to struggle with the outbreak the head of Iran’s Islamic Development Organization said that mosques will reopen further demonstrating a division between medical experts and the country’s religious leaders. Today Iran has had 317,000 confirmed cases and 17,000 have been reported to have died from COVID. A report of the regime’s concealed COVID records was leaked to the BBC in July that indicated that 42,000 citizens had been killed by COVID, over twice the number reported by the Iranian Health Ministry. Showing that the situation is even worse than previously reported, suggesting that when the crisis is over the people may demand reform because of how ineffective the government was.
Challenging religious leadership is Iranian youth. The youth tend to be better middle class and better educated, they are ambitious and look up to the West, the desire a stronger economy and less foreign conflicts. Over the last 10 years, they have actively tried to protest the religious hardliners that run the country at the ballot box and in the streets. Younger Iranians have protested before, in 2009 the Green Movement, or the Persian Spring as some western media called it, called for the removal of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In 2018 and again in 2020 protests called for democratic reforms including the removal of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. The youth were already motivated to change the status quo but the weakness of the government and its declining popularity might enable the youth to implement change.
The Rise in Military Authority
The Iranian military, the Revolutionary Guard, and its paramilitary Basij force have been given power by the Ayatollah to command the country’s pandemic response, including the construction of hospitals and enforcement of quarantine. Part of the concern is that COVID could accelerate Iran’s transition from the theocracy to military autocracy rather than democracy. In March, Tehran approved a significant increase in defense and law enforcement spending intended for the Revolutionary Guard. In April, Khamenei assigned the Revolutionary Guard the responsibility of distributing COVID relief funds to Iranian citizens. This allocation of responsibilities further sidelined the country’s elected leader, President Hassan Rouhani, who has found his power slowly being diminished as the Revolutionary Guard begins managing more of the country. This centralization of power may potentially lead to citizens organizing to demand change.
In May, a cartoon of a cleric attempting to cure a COVID patient with camel urine was published on the Telegram channel of the Iranians Labor News Agency. Also featured in the sketch was a picture of the Supreme Leader with his finger to his lips, warning his critics to be silent. This rare expression of media criticism against the government was met with swift action, the news director of the ILNA and the manager of Telegram were both arrested by the Revolutionary Guard for allegedly insulting insulting “Islam’s sacred principals” The suppression of both information and criticism will likely meet some kind of boiling point soon.
The Future of Democracy
The future of democracy in Iran is being heavily debated right now. While regime approval is possibly the lowest it’s ever been the regime has never been afraid to use force to quell dissent before. During the 2017-2018 protests, it is estimated that 25 people were killed by government forces in the 2020 protests in January the government killed over 2,000 protesters, with the Revolutionary Guard becoming more powerful it is likely any kind of protests will go unchallenged.
Other political analysts have questioned whether the crippling sanctions on Iranian oil will promote change or leave the people in adjunct poverty. Modernization theory suggests that as a country becomes wealthier that it is more likely to democratize, meaning that the heavy sanctions on Iran may be counterintuitive to promoting democracy. Critics of American sanctions have been pointed out that under these economic conditions Iranians have to prioritize basic needs such as food and water over political liberty.
The final nail in the coffin is that many political analysts believe that COVID-19 for as much dissent as it has created, prevents citizens from protesting. Citizens would rather not gather and risk becoming infected. The protests earlier this year as well as the protests in Lebanon and Jordan were all paused because of pandemic concerns. It is impossible to try to force the regime to implement change without protesting and in the current state of the world protesting has been made extremely difficult, meaning that while there is a desire for democracy in Iran it will likely remain out of reach for the foreseeable future.
Marc Gull is a senior political science and international relations double major at SUNY Geneseo. The focus of my studies has been on Middle Eastern politics and the role of the United States in the region.
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