Daily Archives: June 12, 2013

Iran

Rowhani, Qalibaf appear to lead polls to top Friday’s vote, advance to June 21 runoff

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Polling is an inexact science in Iran, so most polls should be taken with a healthy dose of skepticism. Iran Flag Icon

But the field poll data coming from the U.S.-based Information and Public Opinion Solutions is more reliable than most, even though it’s not based in Tehran, because it conducts daily telephone interviews with a sample of over 1,000 potential voters within Iran.

The bottom line is that a runoff seems increasingly likely and, although that runoff seems likeliest to be a faceoff between conservative Tehran mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf and moderate Hassan Rowhani, that’s by no means a certainty.  I continue to believe that any of the five leading candidates could ultimately wind up in the runoff, especially if former longtime foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati withdraws from the race in the next 48 hours in favor of Iran’s top nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, which remains a possibility, given that both candidates are viewed has having the closest ties to Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader since 1989.  That’s especially true if you believe that the 2009 presidential vote was subject to massive electoral fraud — in such case, it seems possible that Rowhani could be excluded through chicanery.  But despite the fact that he’s the most reformist of the six remaining candidate, Rowhani is the only cleric in the race, he has a solid relationship with Khamenei.

The latest results show Rowhani moving for the first time into the lead with 26.6% of the vote at the same time that former presidents Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammed Khatami have endorsed him.  Rafsanjani, a political moderate, had registered to run for president in the election, but he was disqualified by the Guardian Council, a 12-member body close to the Supreme Leader that certifies candidates to run for office in Iran.  The reformist Khatami, who had supported Rafsanjani’s presidential bid, indicated his support for Rowhani after his former vice president Mohammad Reza Aref dropped out of the race on Monday in favor of Rowhani.  Rowhani’s support has steadily increased from a poll last week that showed him with just 8.1%.  (Online polls have shown Rowhani and Aref with much wider support, but those seem skewed toward wealthier, more urban voters likelier to support more liberal candidates like Rowhani and Aref).

For the first time in an IPOS poll, the more ‘principlist’ conservative mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, has slipped into second place.  Despite Qalibaf’s position as a conservative, he’s been a relatively popular mayor and is expected to do well among voters in Tehran, which is home to over 12 million of Iran’s 75 million people.  Last week, however, Qalibaf held a much wider lead with 39% of the vote, though his lead seems to be shrinking as more undecided voters (57% of all voters last week) ultimately choose a candidate to support:

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The third-place candidate, according to the poll, is Mohsen Rezai, whose support seems to be incredibly stable — 16.3% today and 16.6% last week.  Rezai, the former head of the Revolutionary Guards, is seen as a more independent-minded conservative, and he pulls much of his strength from rural Iran and from within Iran’s military forces.  Continue reading Rowhani, Qalibaf appear to lead polls to top Friday’s vote, advance to June 21 runoff →

Germany

As U.S. awaits DOMA decision, Germany’s constitutional court weighs in on gay rights

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By the end of June, the U.S. Supreme Court will render decisions in two of the most important legal cases to affect same-sex marriage in the United States: Hollingsworth v. Perry, which could result in the repeal of California’s Proposition 8, a ballot measure that overturned the state legislature’s enactment of same-sex marriage, and United States v. Windsor, which could strike down the U.S. Defense of Marriage Act.  DOMA, a 1996 law that prohibits same-sex couples from federal benefits of marriage, has been struck down by lower U.S. courts as a violation of the ‘equal protection’ clause of the 14th amendment of the U.S. constitution.  Others have argued that it violates the right of states to determine their own marriage laws and the ‘full faith and credit’ clause of the U.S. constitution that requires states to recognize the law, rights and judgments of the other U.S. states. Germany Flag Icon

Both decisions are among the most highly anticipated opinions of the Court’s summer rulings.

But Germany’s top constitutional court, the Bundesverfassungsgericht, got out in front of the U.S. Supreme Court last week with a landmark decision of its own that in many ways mirrors what proponents of same-sex marriage hope will be a harbinger of the U.S. decision on DOMA.

In a decision that could place pressure on chancellor Angela Merkel in advance of Germany’s federal election in September, the constitutional court ruled that same-sex couples in registered civil partnerships are entitled to the same joint tax filing benefits as those in opposite-sex marriages, exactly the rights that DOMA was originally enacted to prohibit in the United States.  The decision put the fight for German same-sex marriage on the front page of European newspapers in a summer when the parliamentary battles to enact same-sex marriage in the United Kingdom and France have otherwise dominated headlines.

It’s surprisingly in many ways that France and the United Kingdom have been more progressive on same-sex marriage rather than Germany.  Although polls show nearly two-thirds of the British and the French support same-sex marriage, a February 2013 poll showed that three-fourths of Germans support same sex-marriage.  Moreover, UK prime minister David Cameron is the center-right leader of a Conservative Party that faces its most pressing political pressure today from the right, not from the center, and the virulent anti-marriage rallies in France and the widespread opposition to same-sex marriage on France’s center-right means that French president François Hollande’s push for marriage equality, a policy that he campaigned on in 2012, has met significant turbulence.

But Germany’s evolutionary approach to marriage equality has taken a more subdued path through the constitutional court in Karlsruhe as much as through the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament.  Former chancellor Gerhard Schröder and his coalition partner Volker Beck successfully pushed for the enactment of the Life Partnership Act in 2001 when the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD, Social Democratic Party) controlled the government in coalition with Beck’s Bündnis 90/Die Grünen (the Greens).  Following the German constitutional court’s blessing of the law in 2002, the Bundestag followed up in 2004 with revisions to the law that increase the rights of registered life partners, including rights to adoption, alimony and divorce, though not parity with respect to federal tax benefits.

Since taking power in 2005, chancellor Angela Merkel has not pushed additional rights for same-sex couples, which puts her at awkward odds with her coalition partners, the Freie Demokratische Partei (FDP, Free Democratic Party), which supports marriage equality and whose former leader Guido Westerwelle (pictured above with Merkel), Germany’s foreign minister and its vice-chancellor from October 2009 to May 2011, is openly gay.

Both Merkel’s Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU, Christian Democratic Party) and the CDU’s sister party in Bavaria, the more socially conservative and Catholic-based Christlich-Soziale Union in Bayern (CSU, the Christian Social Union in Bavaria), have been traditionally opposed to gay marriage, and as recently as March, the CDU and the CSU reaffirmed their opposition to extending tax benefits to same-sex partners, even though the February 2013 poll showed that two-thirds of CDU-CSU supporters favored same-sex marriage outright.

Despite parliamentary inactivity in Berlin, last week’s decision by Germany’s constitution court, however, is just the latest decision from Karlsruhe that has edged same-sex registered partnerships ever closer to full marriage equality.  Continue reading As U.S. awaits DOMA decision, Germany’s constitutional court weighs in on gay rights →

Iran

The incredibly shrinking president: Ahmadinejad’s subdued role in Iran’s presidential race

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Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has never been one to shrink from a political battle — not during his breakthrough 2005 presidential campaign to his heated, not in his routine, over-the-top attacks against the United States and Israel, and not in his more recent fights with Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei over personnel and other policy disputes.Iran Flag Icon

Ahmadinejad is limited to two consecutive presidential terms and therefore is not eligible to run for reelection in this month’s presidential race, so it was always certain that he would fade somewhat to the background as the race focuses on the six candidates hoping to succeed him.  But it’s staggering to note just how minor a role Ahmadinejad has played in the campaign, especially in light of the fact that he was very recently attempting to boost Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, his chief of staff, to the presidency, thereby giving Ahmadinejad a key role in Iranian affairs even after his own administration ends.

But the Guardian Council refused to permit Mashaei, to run for president earlier in May when it also disqualified former president Hashemi Rafsanjani as well.  When Ahmadinejad tried to make Mashaei Iran’s first vice president in 2009, Khamenei made a rare and direct intervention into domestic politics to overrule the decision and ordered Ahmadinejad to replace Mashaei.  Since his reelection four years ago, Ahmadinejad’s growing rift with principlists loyal to Khamenei have increasingly isolated him within Iran’s domestic political sphere.

One of the reasons why Mashaei is believed to be such a unique threat to the Supreme Leader is that he’s been willing to champion a form of Persian nationalism that harkens back to the time before Shi’a Islam took root in what’s now modern-day Iran.  Mashaei’s ties to Ahmadinejad were forged three decades ago, when Mashaei served in the Revolutionary Guards and in Iran’s intelligence ministry during the 1980s war with Iraq.  He joined Ahmadinejad’s city government when Ahmadinejad became Tehran’s mayor in 2003, and he held a key advisory role during Ahmadinejad’s first presidential term.

But there are other reasons why Khamenei and his conservative ‘principlist’ allies have been wary of Mashaei, including conciliatory comments towards Israel — he once remarked that Iranians are friends of Israelis.  Furthermore, in a country where presidents are required to have religious as well as political credentials, religious conservatives have called Mashaei a ‘deviant’ due to Mashaei’s relatively relaxed views on matters such as the role of music and dancing in Iranian life to the wearing of the hijab.  Ahmadinejad responded to Mashaei’s disqualification by claiming that Mashaei was ‘wronged,’ adding that he hoped Khamenei would intervene and call upon the Guardian Council to reconsider its decision, but those calls have been met with silence from both the Supreme Leader and the Guardian Council.

Since then, however, Ahmadinejad has remained uncharacteristically subdued, in a way that mirrors the relatively quiet role that the unpopular former U.S. president George W. Bush — a longtime Ahmadinejad foil — played in the 2008 presidential election.

Although critics of Iran’s political system have charged that the eight candidates approved by the Guardian Council are all conservatives (the field has now whittled down to six after two hopefuls dropped out earlier this week), they nonetheless represent a fairly wide range of generational, clerical and ideological diversity.  Moreover, Ahmadinejad’s turbulent eight years in office have as been the target of much criticism throughout the election campaign, including as to his handling of Iran’s sputtering economy, growing inflation, widespread unemployment, and the way in which he’s isolated Iran’s position internationally, which has led to economic sanctions that have only exacerbated Iran’s economic woes.

None of the candidates in the race seem incredibly inclined to embrace Ahmadinejad.

The one potential exception is Saeed Jalili, Iran’s current negotiator with the P5+1 international powers over Iran’s nuclear energy program.  Heralded as a frontrunner by the Western and Iranian media alike, Jalili is the closest thing to an incumbent in the race, and he’s absorbed criticism from both principlist candidates (such as Ali Akbar Velayati, a top international adviser to the Supreme Leader) and reformist candidates (such as Hassan Rowhani, who took a more conciliatory tone as Iran’s nuclear negotiator from 2003 to 2005). Continue reading The incredibly shrinking president: Ahmadinejad’s subdued role in Iran’s presidential race →

United States

Remembering Medgar Evers and the fight for civil rights

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Exactly 50 years ago today — on June 12, 1963 — a young 37-year-old civil rights activist was brutally shot in the back in the driveway of his home in Jackson, Mississippi.USflag

That young activist, Medgar Evers, had spent his tragically truncated life as the field secretary for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a role in which he helped James Meredith break the segregation barrier in order to become the first black male to enroll in the University of Mississippi in 1962.

Evers today has entered the pantheon of American heroes.  His remains lie in Arlington National Cemetery near Washington, D.C.  If you fly into Jackson today, you’ll fly into Mississippi’s largest airport, which is now named in honor of Evers.  But at the time, his murderer was twice freed after a jury, comprised solely of white men, refused to convict him — he was convicted only in 1994 on the basis of new evidence.

In the 50 years since Evers death, the United States has become a much more equal place — after all, it elected its first non-white president five years ago, and it’s had two black secretaries of state.  The world of white privilege and segregation that Evers — and Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders of the 1960s — fought to tear down is unrecognizable today.

But that doesn’t mean the cause for civil rights is over.  Within the United States alone, black Americans remain far behind, as a group, on terms of socioeconomic gains.  Immigrants to the United States, many of whom came to this country as young children, remain in painful legal limbo.  Gay and lesbian Americans struggle not just for the right to same-sex marriage, but the right to live, work and exist without prejudice.  A U.S. prison population in excess of seven million people (though that number is starting to decline), many of who are in prison for non-violent offenses, faces innumerable challenges to even their basic safety behind bars.  The revelations of the NSA and PRISM programs show that the U.S. government continues to push forward with new surveillance tools that, though they may enhance homeland security, innumerably reduce global privacy rights.

That highlights the fact that the lines between greater civil rights in the United States and greater civil rights globally has blurred.  In many ways, the work of Medgar Evers is now a broader, globalized struggle.  U.S. activists work alongside European, Asia, Arab and African activists to challenge inequality worldwide.

  • In Mauritania and elsewhere in the Sahel, the fight continues against the continued practice of human slavery.
  • In Turkey, the crackdown this week of protesters at Taksim Square by prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan have highlighted the fact that the biggest threat isn’t creeping Islamism, but the more garden-variety illiberal disregard for basic civil rights like freedom of speech and freedom of expression, and deeper abuses of power that have hollowed out Turkey’s democracy.
  • Even as western Europe enters a world of same-sex marriage equality, many pockets of the world feature significant hurdles for gay and lesbian individuals — sub-Saharan Africa continues to treat gay activists with brutality and just yesterday, Russia passed a troublingly broad anti-gay law.
  • In Iran, moderate presidential candidate Hassan Rowhani has pushed for the loosening of political and cultural censorship and greater political freedoms within the framework of Iran’s existing Islamic republic.
  • In the People’s Republic of China, residents of Hong Kong marched last week on the occasion of the anniversary of the government crackdown on Tiananmen Square in 1989.
  • The Arab Spring protests of 2011 — from Bahrain to Tunisia to Egypt — have made political participation unavoidable throughout the Arab world, even if new majoritarian Islamist governments now face new civil rights challenges in finding a way to make Islamic democracy work without introducing new elements of religious, political and gender-based inequality.
  • A few hundred miles from the coast of Florida, Haitians continue to suffer from some of the worst poverty in the world, exacerbated by the tolls taken by the 2010 earthquake.

So as today’s more globalized fight for civil rights continues, it’s worth reflecting today to remember Evers and an entire generation of Americans who defined much of the content of what we think of as ‘civil rights’ in their fight for racial equality in the United States half a century ago.

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Bottom photo credit to Kevin Lees — Arlington National Cemetery, Virginia, May 2012.