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Elections for the eight Majlis (parliament) in the Islamic Republic of Iran took place ‎under circumstances in which an unprecedented event took place during the last days ‎prior to voting on March 14, 2008. The leader of the Islamic regime publicly, formally ‎and expressly said that preference among the candidates was for those “who had paved ‎the way for the government”. This was a direct reference to a specific list of candidates, ‎i.e. “Jebhe Motahed Osoolgaran” (The United Front of the Principalists) which comprises ‎of pro-government conservatives.‎

The suggestion of the leader of the regime for voting to a specific list of candidates at a ‎public rally is something that has never happened since the founding of the Islamic ‎Republic in 1979. So when something like this does happen for the first time it conveys a ‎very clear symbolic message which is indicative of the special and unique importance ‎that the victory of the candidates on that list has for the regime and its leader. The ‎importance is so great that the leader of the regime goes out of his way, sets the norms ‎that have been carefully observed till then aside and bears the political costs of such a ‎departure.‎

What the impact of such a move is on the electorate and what percent of it is actually ‎influenced by the call and in what manner should be the subject of another analysis. But ‎the effect on the voters is probably not the most important impact of the leader’s beckon: ‎More important is the effect that the leader’s position will have on the administrators and ‎observers of the elections.‎

One should not forget that the leader of the Islamic Republic is also the religious leader ‎of those who look up to him for inspiration and leadership. All of whom must be loyal to ‎the leader of the Islamic regime, and most of whom – which includes the observers and ‎administrators of the elections – in fact are. Let’s for a moment imagine a situation in ‎which the leader of such a regime steps forward in favor of a specific list of candidates ‎but the candidates are defeated at the polls. The natural conclusive result of such a defeat ‎is that people chose candidates who are in contradiction to the wishes of the leader.* ‎From the perspective of forces loyal to the regime and its leader, such an outcome would ‎be catastrophic and which would have to be prevented by any means. ‎

In such a context, the voting preference of the leader of the regime creates a duty among ‎the loyalists involved in the elections to do anything they can so that the results of the ‎elections would not be in contradiction with the express desires of the leader as the ‎credibility of the regime lies in the untarnished image of its leader. In fact, the ‎announcement of the position of ayatollah Khamenei in voting for pro-government ‎candidates creates a kind of religious divine duty in the eyes of many of its administrators ‎because it is coming from the political and religious apex of the state. The immediate ‎impact of the announcement of his position is that it can be seen as a religious license for ‎the government authorities, who are the administrators of the elections and have an ‎interest in its outcome, to guide the event to the desires of the leader.‎

In 1998 during the period when serial murders of intellectuals were planned and ‎perpetrated by certain elements of the Ministry of intelligence, and the subsequent arrest ‎of the involved agents, ayatollah Khamenei made a remark that later on brought on ‎unexpected results. In his public talk, the leader said, “You can be certain that those who ‎perpetrated these murders are not from amongst the pro regime forces but agents of ‎foreign powers.”‎

A few months after that speech and with the revelation of interrogation films of some of ‎the suspects in the serial murders, the horrendous methods (tortures) that the interrogation ‎team used against the suspects to extract “confessions” of “moral corruption” and ‎‎“cooperation with the CIA and Mossad” became evident. The public disclosure of these ‎interrogation methods, whose result was the derailment of the case because of the ‎hundreds of pages of fake confessions, finally led to the arrest and interrogation of the ‎interrogation team because of the pursuit by the then president seyed Mohammad ‎Khatami. During the latter interrogations, when the team members led by Javad Azadeh ‎were asked on what grounds did they torture their prisoners to get confessions out of ‎them, their response was shocking in that they said when the supreme leader said that the ‎perpetrators were without any doubt agents of foreign powers, the interrogators viewed ‎this as a religious duty to beat the suspects unrelentlessly until they confessed that there ‎in fact agents of foreign powers. ‎

In the context of the relationships that existed within the security forces, this response ‎made sense. In all honesty was it conceivable that interrogators loyal to the regime would ‎report after four or five months of interrogations that the conclusions of their grilling ‎would prove the erroneousness of the views of the leader?‎

The reality is that the Iranian state system is not similar to a Western democracy where a ‎party leader heads the state. In the Islamic Republic’s model the head of the state is also ‎the commander of the armed forces, the spiritual leader, and the religious source of ‎imitation for his followers. It is under these circumstances that any word the leader utters ‎which is indicative of his desire to prove a position or implement a political action can ‎have very serious practical impact. These words are so powerful that they can even turn ‎any manipulation of the electoral process into legitimate acts.‎
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‎* It is in this light that during the elections for the seventh president of the Islamic regime (1997) ‎government authorities tried to dismiss the remarks of the representative of the leader in the Passdaran ‎Revolutionary Guards Corps (who favored presidential candidate cleric Nategh Nouri) and the remarks of ‎the secretary of the Jame-e Rohaniyat Mobarez (who said that his “guess was that the leader favored Mr. ‎Nategh Nouri”) as personal remarks and not that of the leader.‎