Iranian Elections.

On Friday June 12th Iran held it's general election. I have to confess that I've not really been following the campaign. This is partly because British politics have been so much fun recently but mainly because as of six weeks ago Iran's election was predicted to be a one horse race with incumbent President Ahmadinejad expected to win around 80-90% of the vote.

Then, possibly because of Obama's tour of Arab countries, the opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi experienced a massive surge in support amongst young, urbanised Iranians. When the result of the poll was released today it showed that Ahmadinejad had won with 63% of the vote. This prompted Mousavi to claim the election was rigged and dismiss the whole thing as a charade while his supporters took to the streets in some of the worst unrest Iran has seen in ten years.

I've yet to hear any evidence to support the idea that the election was rigged but it will be interesting to see how this plays out because I don't think I'm giving away any state secrets when I say that there are plenty of people outside of Iran who would like to see regime change in Tehran.

(14/6) Edited to make clear. I don't think there is anything suspicious about yesterday's protests in Iran. It looks to me as if the Mousavi supporters got whipped up into such a frenzy ahead of the election that when their man didn't win all that energy had to go somewhere. You see a similar thing a lot in football when a team expects to win a cup final and then doesn't conspiracy theories abound and the teams supporters go on a bit of a rampage. The worry is that if the protests carry on then every trouble maker in the world will then descend on Iran and attempt to use the protests as a way to destabilise the country.