The World

I am writing my newspaper column for tomorrow about Iran, but here are some preliminary thoughts on the central question – was this a fix? Even in the West, there are plenty of people who are ready to buy the line that Ahmadinejad may actually have won – with Iran’s votes splitting along class-lines, and the poor and the devout out-polling the urban middle-classes.

But I think the reporting in today’s FT and elsewhere illustrates why that line of argument is implausible. Roula Khalaf points out that the sheer margin of victory is inconsistent with what we know about Iranian voting patterns and so “defies belief”. Najmeh Bozorgmehr makes the vital point that officially Moussavi lost even in his home town and even in Azeri-speaking areas, despite his Azeri background. Juan Cole, an American academic who has been a scathing critic of neo-con policy to the Middle East, nonetheless does not buy the Iranian election results. He argues that cultural divisions within the Iranian electorate are at least as important as the economic ones – with the young and women favouring reformist candidates.

And then there is the fact that the government in Iran is hardly behaving like a group that has just won a clean election – beating up demonstrators, detaining opposition leaders and shutting down mobile-phone networks. This has all the hallmarks of a stolen election.