SHAHRIAR, Iran -- This impoverished farming region near Tehran has little time for the excitement surrounding Friday's parliamentary polls that is sweeping the Iranian capital.
What prompts residents of Shahriar, a neglected town of rural emigres south of the capital, to vote is the vague and distant hope of an economic turnaround and more jobs.About two dozen candidates vying for the single seat allotted to Shahriar and surrounding villages, one of 290 in the assembly, campaigned on a promise to bring more attention to the region and pave the way for greater development.
All are running as independents, eschewing partisan politics and the wider issues underlying the battle between President Mohammad Khatami's reformist camp and his conservative rivals.
Demands for greater freedom and democracy--the overriding concern for many voters in Tehran and other big cities--cut little ice with Shahriar's constituents.
"I am just a baker's helper. What do I know about these things?" said a young man when asked about Khatami's popular base in Shahriar.
"It's jobs, jobs and jobs and nothing else," said the unemployed father of two in Yabarak, a dusty rural suburb of Shahriar.
"I feel useless around here. Every night I go home feeling ashamed of myself before my wife and children," he said to sympathetic nods from fellow jobless men.
Shahriar, a strip of fertile land on the northern edge of a vast desert, has been hard hit by a long drought and a lack of effective government aid to farmers.
For years harvests have fallen below expectations, failing to generate enough revenue to absorb the large pool of jobless who have emigrated from remote provinces in search of work.
Average unemployment in Iran is about 20 percent, but the figure is far higher in the countryside.
Local administrations, including the newly elected rural councils, often complain of insufficient help from central government to provide badly needed public services.
"We have been promised for seven years that we will be given telephones and gas fuel. But neither have come," said a middle-aged woman in Kord-Amir village. "We expect them to take better care of us. We are almost part of Tehran, but we don't have the resources."
But the grim economic mood has failed to discourage villagers from voting for the new parliament. A street sweeper said he had voted for a government bureaucrat promising to use his clout to attract more public funds to the region.
Many said they had voted according to the candidates' personal and professional reputation, a general trend in smaller towns and country regions.
Reformist groups, bolstered by a large turnout in major cities, said they were headed for victory in the polls seen as a referendum on President Khatami's liberal policies.
A convincing victory for the reformers would boost Khatami in his efforts to create a civil society within Iran's Islamic system, a drive that has been stymied by conservatives.
For their part, most conservatives support more gradual change, fearing that swift reforms would water down Iran's Islamic and revolutionary values.
"We all love Islam and our holy Koran. But joblessness is the real plague that threatens this society. It is at the root of all evils," said one voter in Shahriar.