TEHRAN - Iranians go to the ballot box Friday to elect a new parliament in what is being touted as a pivotal battle between reformers and their opponents, yet many here don't see much difference politically.

"To a great extent it's like choosing between two kinds of cola," says political analyst Khosro Abedi. "There's not a big difference between many of the candidates."

With a bewildering 5,000-plus hopefuls in the running, many of them unknowns, the best-known names are likely to win the top prizes -- underlining the impression that business-as-usual, and not reform, is the order of the day. Certainly it's (Iranian politics) a lot like a family affair: among the candidates on both sides are the brothers of Khatami and Iran's supreme leader Ali Khamenei and the daughter of former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Rafsanjani himself is also a candidate whose victory would mean another obstacle for pro-Khatami faction.

"We've all been deceived so many times," says a 49-year-old Tehran butcher who declined to give his name but acknowledged he probably wouldn't vote on Friday.

"We've heard the promises: we're going to make it better, everything is going to change," he says, pointing ruefully to overflowing cases of unsold meat he claims most people just simply can't afford.

"But it's been like this for years."
 

U.S. Hopes For Iran Could Be Premature, Reuters, February 17

WASHINGTON - U.S. leaders might end up disappointed when they pin hopes for quick rapprochement with Iran on Friday's parliamentary elections, analysts say.

Even if "reformists" win a majority in the 290-seat Iranian parliament, their conservative rivals are likely to retain strongholds from which they can fight a rear guard action against normalization with the country they have called the Great Satan for the past 20 years, they add.

Presidential elections in 1997 raised similar hopes that Tehran and Washington could soon patch up their old quarrels. But the most Khatami ever offered the United States was a "dialogue of civilizations", with more people-to-people contacts.

Khatami and the "reformers" would hesitate to stick their necks out on relations with Washington without support from Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who is widely seen as close to the conservatives fighting the elections.
 

"Vote Wouldn't Change A Thing", Agence France Press, February 16

TEHRAN - … "The government talks and talks. They keep on babbling but they don't understand the unemployment is killing us," he says, stuffing his hands in the pockets of his dirty red jacket to ward off the cold. "Ninety percent of the guys don't have a job around here."

"Around here" is Khazaneh in south Tehran, a tumble-down neighbourhood of grafitti-littered alleys and dusty shops without customers that you could just about call working-class -- that is, if anybody had a job.

According to official figures, Iran's unemployment is between 10 and 15 percent, while outside estimates put it at more than twice that.

But here in ramshackle Khazaneh, 90 minutes but a world away from the lipsticked-girls laughing on their cell phones down the shopping avenues of north Tehran, it's the rare young man who has a job to go when he wakes up in the morning.

"We're all just prisoners here," says 29-year-old Mohammad. "We have abilities, we're not stupid. But there is nothing for us to do. The economy is zero."

Newspapers and candidates talk about the importance of Friday's legislative elections.

But the talk means little to these young men, who say they have heard all the promises, all the pledges of "reform" and "progress", before.

"Even if I voted it wouldn't change a thing," Jaman says, as his friends crowd around him and nod their heads in agreement.
 

Pro-Khatami Candidates Pledge Allegiance To Velayat-E Faqih, Reuters, February 17

The conservatives who have dominated the outgoing parliament say their top priority is to protect the system of velayat-e faqih, rule by a leading Islamic jurist, created by Khomeini. Pro-Khatami reformers pledge allegiance to the constitution, which enshrines that role. 

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