Today, Al Quds Al Arabi endorsed the fair conduct of the Iranian elections with an editorial entitled “Iranians respond to Obama”. It is unfortunate that the paper did so only a short while before the Iranian Supreme Leader, later today, ordered an investigation to examine allegations of vote rigging.

According to Al Quds Al Arabi, the unrest in Iran which has followed the elections reflect the pressures exerted by the US, Israel and some of the moderate Arab states which are aimed at the removal of the current regime. The paper does not attribute domestic unrest to anger over vote rigging.

Although the paper concedes that  some accusations of vote rigging may be true, it finds it improbable that vote rigging would have occurred on such a wide scale, given that Ahmadinejad won by at least 12 million votes. To prove its point it observes that Robert Fisk of the Independent hardly touched on accusations of vote rigging during his coverage of the Iranian elections.

Al Quds Al Arabi goes on to assert that the protests and unrest are limited to certain areas in Tehran and are confined to the middle classes.

Ahmadinejad’s success in the elections is explained both by the support of Ayatollah Khamanei the spiritual leader of the Islamic revolution, as well as the rural and marginalised urban working classes. Ahmadinejad’s appeal to them derives from the financial aid he has given them, from his anti corruption drives, and from the simplicity with which he lives his life.

For Al Quds Al Arabi, Ahmadinejad’s  re-election is the first real reaction of the Islamic world to Obama’s speech in Cairo.The Iranian people’s response to Obama is to re elect a president that is determined to defy US and Israeli threats and determined to exercise Iran’s right under international law to pursue its own nuclear programme.

For Abd Al Rahman Al Rashed writing for Al Sharq Al Awsat, the Iranian election results came as no surprise and vote rigging is the least that the current regime is prepared to do in order to sustain itself in power.

He regards the current unrest as the beginnings of an uprising. However, emboldened by an imagined electoral success, he anticipates that Ahmadinejad, like Saddam Hussein, will attempt to diffuse domestic turmoil with his foreign policy agenda.

Vote rigging will be followed by internal repression.

The elections presage a new phase in Iranian politics in which the regime will confront a domestic uprising for the very first time in thirty years of the revolution. That uprising will be led by political heavyweights like Hashimi Rafsanjani, Mir Mousavi and Mahdi Karoubi.

 In the recent past, when Muhammad Khatami was merely president in name only, dissident voices never breached the walls of the universities.  Now protesters have spilled out on to the streets. The halcyon days of the Revolution, when the youth were its central pillar, have come to an end. Now they are a thorn in its throat. The current regime is following in the footsteps its predecessor. The Shah’s government collapsed not through force of arms. It fell because neither could the prisons nor the streets cope with the sheer number of protesters. 

The current regime is witnessing a revolt from the youth. It will have to resort to foreign conflicts if it is to strengthen its grip over the nation.