IRAN: Conservatives' claims to be the legitimate government are flawed because of blatant rigging, writes David Hirst in Tehran.
With their victory in the parliamentary elections, Iran's arch-conservative clerical oligarchy has made a decisive comeback in the power struggle against President Khatami and his reformists.
However, with blatant rigging and intimidation, it has suffered a grievous blow to its own legitimacy and that of the Islamic Republic as a whole. "These people," said a liberal Islamist, "have regained a maximum power at the price of maximum distance from the people."
President Khatami and the reformists owe their defeat in part to their own shortcomings by their failure to humanise and democratise the system from within-- on the strength of which they gained control of the republic's two key, elected institutions in the first place.
However, their failure doesn't translate into moral or political gain for their adversaries.
For everyone knows the main reason for their failure was the relentless obstruction by the republic's unelected Islamic institutions, which the conservatives resorted to in the name of their reactionary interpretation of Islam.
"This is the end of the Khatamist reforms," said a sympathiser, "but not the end of the reformist struggle."
During the Khatami era, reform was led from within the system for both sides in the power struggle were products of the Khomeini revolution. Though one of them had, in effect, come to place a higher value on democracy than Islam, it was not ready at the end of the day to push its ambitions to the point of risking the destruction of the regime and itself with it.
Reform is now expected to develop into something much broader, more authentic and harder to control.
There has been a repetitive pattern to Iran's long struggle between modernity and tradition, freedom and despotism, a struggle which is still wholly unresolved.
Out of the short-lived chaos that has followed the collapse of one form of arbitrary rule arises a new form that creates the conditions for yet another revolt by virtually the whole of society.
With the conservatives' latest power grab, the Islamic Republic certainly seems to be conforming to this cycle. A growing polarisation between rulers and ruled is expected to start with a convergence, already apparent, between "government reformists" now convinced of the futility of working within the system and reformists whom society has meanwhile been nurturing from below, especially among the country's two million university students.
Leaders of both disavow any revolutionary ambitions, any interest in taking their struggle to the streets, with the inevitable violence that would ensue. But they cannot not gravitate towards greater militancy.
As defeated reformists seek to coalesce, the victorious conservatives, confronted with the problem of how to use their monopoly of power now substantially restored, are more likely to fall into dissension.
Their "rational" wing, as they are known, will probably seek to form a partnership with those reformists, the tamest of them, still left within the system, to appease the people with an easing of the widely detested Islamic social and cultural restrictions, and even do something which, when proposed by the reformists, they were apt to brand as "treason": contact with the US.
Their "irrational" wing, believers in an even purer form of "Islamic government" will be deeply suspicious of such tendencies.
The republic, some say, has just emerged from perhaps its gravest constitutional crisis ever, only defused, essentially, by Ayatollah Khatami's humiliating acquiescence to the conservatives' "constitutional coup".
That the outcome was so one- sided can only have laid the basis for a larger crisis, a more dangerous collision in the future. One in which the regime no longer has the shield which Ayatollah Khatami and the reformists furnished, to protect it from the direct wrath of the people.
How and when the collision comes to pass depends on the evolution of forces within each camp.
It will be slower in the making if the "rational" conservatives set the official agenda, and with a subservient legislature make discernible progress in their much-trumpeted, principal electoral aim, "solving the people's problems". It will be faster if the "irrationalists" take command, pushing the spiritual leader, Ali Khamenei, into greater repression and extremism.
"'We are in a new era and it's hard to say which way things will go," said a proscribed newspaper editor, 'but if a regime which already lacks three classical elements of power - legitimacy, popular participation, and effective performance - decides to put all its faith in the fourth, the instruments of coercion, it will fall, because, in a real showdown, the army, revolutionary guards, and Basij [people's militia] will go over to the people.'