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By Holly Dagres
Ms. Dagres is a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Middle East Program and curator of The Iranist Substack.
A young Iranian woman wore baggy jeans, a backpack slung over her shoulder and a black mask, possibly to protect her identity. Freely leaving her reddish-brown hair, in violation of mandatory rules on the wearing of the hijab in the Islamic Republic, she painted in Persian on a wall in the holy city of Mashhad: “Khamenei, you are next. “
His stern warning to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei came in May, just a day after President Ebrahim Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash. And while undeniably dangerous, the act of defiance, videotaped on Raisi’s devotee and widely circulated on social media. These are not those days in Iran, where a generation of young people is deeply disillusioned with the prestige quo and needs the prestige quo of Iran’s devout geriatric ruler to disappear.
The discontent of young Iranians played a very important role in the recent elections to upgrade Raisi, when a majority of the country rejected the neufam – the formula – and boycotted the elections. According to Iran’s official count, only 40% of the registered electorate participated in the first round of voting on June 28, the lowest turnout in the Islamic Republic’s 45-year history. That figure increased in last week’s second round to 50%, with some suspecting actual turnout could be even lower. Elections in Iran are neither relaxed nor fair, and videos from across the country showed empty polling stations. In the end, the so-called reformer Masoud Pezeshkian won over the extremist Saeed Jalili.
For millions of Iranians, there is no suitable option: either the applicants were approved through the Guardian Council, a 12-member body, six of whom Khamenei hand-picked. But it turns out that the magnitude of the boycott has put the regime in retreat. The Supreme Leader took longer than usual to deliver his usual message congratulating the Iranian people for voting. The fact that so many groups (dissidents, activists, as well as the grieving families of the murdered protesters) joined this act of civil disobedience signaled to the regime and the world that they do not need an Islamic republic.
The low turnout was not unexpected. Shortly after the election was announced, the hashtags #NoWayI’llVote and #ElectionCircus began circulating in X, along with calls not to vote. According to a poll conducted through the Group for the Analysis and Measurement of Attitude in Iran in June, among Iranians who said they did not plan not to vote or were undecided, only about 70% cited their “opposition to the general system of the Islamic Republic” as an argument. Before the second circular of the July 5 election, another hashtag, #TreacherousMinority, appeared to criticize those who planned to vote for Mr. Pezeshkian, who opposes the violence that is synonymous with compulsory wearing of the hijab and advocates closer ties with the West. Some equated dipping your index finger in ink after voting to putting a finger in the blood of protesters.
Many of those who announced their intention to boycott the vote on social media belonged to Nasleh Zed, or Generation Z, a word that has recently entered the Persian lexicon, about 60% of Iran’s approximately 90 million citizens are under the age of 30. The first in Iran to grow up with illegal satellite dishes and censored web access via VPNs, which gave them a window into the free world. As they grew up with the same desires and aspirations as young people around the world, Gen Z Iranians saw successive citizens vow to improve their lives as the situation worsened, sparking a wave of mass protests and brutal repression.
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