What’s Changed 15 Years After Iran’s Green Movement

Fifteen years after the 2009 Iranian presidential election, which fueled a mass protest movement, the nation is again facing a presidential election just over a month after the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and on the heels of the Women, Life, Freedom (WLF) movement.

So what’s changed a decade-and-a-half later? Experts like Alex Vatanka, director of the Middle East Institute’s Iran program, told Newsweek via email that the “Iran of today is very different than 15 years ago.”

Fifteen Years Ago: The Green Movement, 2009

The 2009 Iranian presidential election saw unprecedented voter turnout, largely due to the excitement over reformist candidates and the thought of change within the system. Nader Hashemi, a Georgetown University professor and co-editor of The People Reloaded: The Green Movement and the Struggle for Iran’s Future, told Newsweek in an email, “Reliable figures suggest 80-85% of eligible voters participated in the 2009 elections. Based on previous voting trends, large voter turnout translated into victory for reformist candidates.”

It is held by various scholars of Iran, including Hashemi, and millions of Iranian voters that reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi won the election, “but his victory was denied when the regime staged an electoral coup,” Hashemi said. Instead, hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became president, sparking much controversy and leading many Iranians into the streets to protest, chanting in Farsi, “Where is my vote?”

Ali Banuazizi, a professor at Boston College, told Newsweek via email that the “protests were prompted by what millions of mostly young, urban, middle-class Iranians viewed as a rigged presidential election—at a time when many still believed that a reformist and democratic change in the regime was possible.”

The Iranian government refutes these claims, stating that Ahmadinejad won over 62 percent of the vote, with Mousavi garnering around 34 percent.

Newsweek has reached out to Iran’s Foreign Ministry for comment via email on Saturday.

On June 15, 2009, hundreds of thousands of Mousavi supporters marched through Tehran’s Azadi (Freedom) Square demanding the annulment of the election results. Hashemi estimates that “3 million people in Tehran participated in a street protest over this state of affairs.” The crowd was met with a harsh and violent government crackdown, with hundreds of people arrested, injured, and threatened. “A brutal crackdown followed and street protests rocked Iran for the next 6 months,” Hashemi added. It’s believed that at least 100 Iranians were killed in the protests.

Dubbed the Green Movement due to protesters’ use of the color symbolic of Mousavi’s campaign, some claim the protests were the country’s largest since the 1979 Revolution. Overtime the movement eventually died out and Ahmadinejad ruled for four more years until 2013.

‘Much Has Changed’

“Much has changed in Iran over the last 15 years,” Hashemi told Newsweek. “The Islamic Republic has grown more repressive, the crisis of political legitimacy has greatly expanded, and the economy has collapsed producing mass poverty and pauperization across the country.”

The country, like any, has changed over the past decade-and-a-half. Over the years, the country’s crippling economy, sky-high inflation rates, and high poverty rates, with an estimated 30 percent of the population living in poverty, have negatively impacted Iranian households. Then, in 2022, the WLF brought Iranians’ dissatisfaction with the government to the surface.

On September 16, 2022, a Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa (Jina) Amini, died in police custody, with many speculating she was killed by the country’s morality police. She was arrested for a dress code violation, a common arrest for women in Iran. The morality police are part of Iran’s Law Enforcement Forces (LEF), which have been accused of human rights abuses. The suspicious circumstances of her death sparked protests across the country in nearly 130 cities. The protests were notable for their inclusivity of classes, ethnic groups, regions, and genders.

They were fueled by discontent with the government due to deep grievances regarding the state of women’s rights, poor management, and the country’s crippling economy. The government brutally cracked down on protesters, restricted internet use, targeted dissenters, and engaged in heavy surveillance. The protests mushroomed for months, spreading outside of Iran. Today, many accounts from inside Iran show women still disregarding the dress code.

Vatanka, and severalother experts, believe the Green Movement shattered hope for Iranians that real change could be orchestrated through elections.

Vatanka added: “This is why streets protests have increased in the last 15 years.”

With a slightly different view, Iranian American journalist Negar Mortazavi told Newsweek in a phone call that WLF protesters had hope for “radical change,” but after two years “that radical outlook has lost its momentum, and part of that urban middle class is realizing that maybe that kind of radical revolutionary change isn’t possible,” which could potentially lead more people to participate in elections.

The decade-and-a-half since the Green Movement also saw notable diplomacy changes, including the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and then the United States’ subsequent withdrawal. A series of new sanctions have been levied by Western governments as well.

Presidential Election, 2024

The first round of this snap presidential election following Raisi’s death, who was believed to be running for another term, is set to take place on June 28. The president is the country’s second-highest ranking official, under the Supreme Leader, who controls the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

Six candidates out of 80 were approved by the government’s Guardian Council, a 12-member body with six clerics appointed by the Supreme Leader. The Guardian Council has repeatedly thrown out reformist and moderate candidates. Mortazavi speculated that perhaps given the low voter turnout in the previous election, the Council permitted Masoud Pezeshkian, who is supported by reformists, admission to attract more voters. “They didn’t just let him run assuming he would definitely lose, no, he has a chance,” Mortazavi added.

The winner is deemed as whoever garners more than 50 percent of the vote. If no one has a clear majority, the two runner-ups hold another election. The first debate is set for June 17, which Mortazavi “expects to be very lively.”

The last presidential elections in 2021, which ushered in Raisi, received record low voter turnout.

“In the 2009 elections, many Iranian voters came to vote for change, thinking the system can be gradually reformed. That the Islamic Republic can become more ‘republican’ in the sense of reflecting the people’s wishes and less ‘Islamic’ in the sense of amassing power in the hands of an unelected Supreme Leader,” Vatanka told Newsweek. “Today, and definitely this younger generation of Iranians do not believe that change is possible through the ballot box.”

He called the elections a “political show, a feel-good factor exercise for the two powers that run Iran, Ali Khamenei and the generals in the Revolutionary Guards.” Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has been in power since 1989.

Columbia University Professor Hamid Dabashi and author of The Green Movement in Iran, told Newsweek in an email since the 2009 election “not a single so called ‘election’ in the Islamic republic has been legitimate. They are all without a single exception fake, phony, staged, and engineered. The ruling Islamist regime in Iran is beyond repair.”

“Here is the most tragic part,” Vatanka said. “Even if the most reformist among reformists is allowed to run and win in a presidential election, he still cannot override the wishes of the Supreme Leader. And its Khamenei’s policies since 1989 that are a core obstacle to change in Iran.”

Hashemi echoed similar sentiments, “Fifteen years ago, Iran had a sizable middle class that retained hope that by working within the electoral laws of the [Islamic Republic of Iran] IRI, gradual political change could emerge.” But since 2009, “people are more economically impoverished and politically disillusioned,” he added.

“I doubt many young people, who form the bulk of Iran’s population, will vote. Voting again for another reformist candidate in the hope of producing political change elicits the following response: ‘been there, done that, it does not work.'”

With hopes for reformist change quashed by “the increasingly autocratic and repressive policies of the ruling theocrats and their closely allied security forces, especially in response to the ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ uprisings,” Banuaziz told Newsweek.

“Today’s discontents and protests are no longer just about ‘engineered’ elections, but rather against the Islamic regime’s denial of basic individual freedoms, gender inequality, endemic corruption, and economic hardships and poverty,” he added.

“If participation remains low like in the last election, then we will just see more of the same of the hardliners,” Mortazavi told Newsweek. “I think everything will come down to the live debates on television, is [Masoud] Pezeshkian going to be able to be a voice for disenfranchised voters for that big part of the population that is just angry at the status quo political, economic, social, cultural.”

Newsweek has reached out to a number of subject matter experts via email on Friday and Saturday and will update this article with new comments and perspectives.