On June 12, Iranian voters will choose among four leading candidates for president, but their real choice is singular: whether to continue on the course plotted by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This ought to be a no-brainer: Ahmadinejad has made a mess of the economy, clamped down on political dissent and social freedoms, militarized the state, and earned the enmity of much of the world. In large Iranian cities, even those who voted for him in 2005 are almost unanimous in their disappointment. But in Iranian elections, demographics are everything. It all depends on who, exactly, shows up to the polls.
Iran has its own version of the Red State dynamic. Although just 35 percent of the population lives in rural villages, which are more traditional and conservative than the cities, these people make up almost 65 percent of those who have voted in elections since 2005. Rural Iranians have been well-served by the Islamic Republic in general, and by Ahmadinejad in particular. The villages are poor, but since 1979, the Islamic Republic has brought them electricity, education, clean water, roads, local governance, and countless other improvements. Rural Iranians benefit from generous subsidies, becoming clients of the state even while urban Iranians have grown increasingly alienated.
In the cities, the failure of Iranian export industries has produced joblessness and resentment. Civil society--including the country's largest universities and its impressive community of journalists, activists, and intellectuals--faces unrelenting repression. The country's ill-used middle class spins its wheels, almost completely shut out of the country's economic, political, and cultural life. It is in the cities that young Iranians chafe most visibly at the Islamic dress code and the laws against the mingling of the sexes. But while urban Iranians outnumber their rural brethren, they are so disenchanted with the Islamic Republic as a whole that they are increasingly disinclined to vote.
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