From Kurdistan to Tehran: the urban-rural divide as Iranians turn out to vote

As excitement mounts leading to Friday’s parliamentary elections, a palpable difference in priorities is emerging, as it often does, between voters in Iran’s urban areas and its provinces. Unlike in Tehran, voters and campaign activists in the suburbs and rural areas are engaged in discussions that diverge sharply from their fellow countrymen in the capital.

While provincial voters are primarily concerned with practical issues related to rural development and ethnic and kinship affiliations, urbanites are often drawn into the kind of political and ideological discourse that makes national headlines – a never-ending battle of reformists, principlists, moderates, and everything in between.

Farshad, a campaign organizer for a Kurdish candidate in Kermanshah province, has studied in Tehran and experienced the urban-rural contrast firsthand. “People here are not subject to the forces of national politics,” says Farshad of the political environment in the Kermanshah district his candidate is hoping to seize. “Elections in big cities, especially in Tehran, are subject to the political situation – how open or closed the political environment is.” He adds: “Instead of our demands being political, the demands here are more local.”

Voters are concerned with economic development, Farshad says of Kermanshah’s electorate. “Instead of looking for a representative who ascribes to a certain political discourse, they’re more interested in someone who’s going to bring about welfare, development, and better services.”

For Mona, who lives in Tehran but is originally from Kermanshah, demands are more tangible in her home province. She says it’s important Kermanshah’s winning candidate should support the right to teach in her mother tongue, Kurdish, as opposed to Iran’s national language, Persian. “It really matters to me who represents [my] region because we have some specific unique issues,” she says, noting she plans to depart Tehran, and its reformist-principlist cacophony, and cast her ballot back home.