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Long live the solidarity of the people!

- Both the boycott and the ballots cast spoke clearly. No complicated mathematics is required. The picture is clearer than daylight.

- Seventy-six per cent of the people want the existing situation to change: 60 per cent through boycott and 16 per cent through voting for the reformist candidate.

- Of these, the 60 per cent of votes not placed in the ballot box are the winners of this election. The people’s true chosen representative—the one who is absent, and the conditions that do not exist today—received the vote of the majority of the people of Iran.

- Even if we regard every vote cast for the other three candidates as a vote for existing conditions, they amount to only 24 per cent of the votes of society as a whole: a minority that will never be able to impose its way of thinking on the majority, even if it possesses all the instruments of hard power.

- In their own homes, among their neighbours, in the streets of their cities and in everyday life, they will encounter this absolute majority. They will find nowhere that has not taken on the colour of change. It is not politics that has changed; it is the cultural depth of society that has been transformed, extending even to Iran’s most distant villages. They too will be compelled to change, even if they possess the leathery toughness of the Mongols and the dogmatism of invading desert tribes.

- In this election the people showed that even when 60 per cent boycott the election, the representative of the mode of thought that has taken the majority of society hostage is still unable to obtain a majority of the votes of even the 40 per cent who participated.

- In my view, all the people together—both those who boycotted and those who voted—presented a clear picture of what the people want.

- The question now is what these people, having spoken so clearly, will do in the second round.

Whatever they do, I believe it will be right. The time has come to stop giving recommendations and instead trust our collective judgement, because we have shown that, despite all the differences within society, the collective decision of the people can produce an outcome more sound than individual recommendations and analyses.

Aydin Areta