With supreme leader’s blessing, Pezeshkian bids to change Iran
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In a speech on June 3, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei explained that the country’s next president should be “an active, hardworking, knowledgeable president who believes in the principles of the revolution.” He added that “the elections should be an epic scene of honor and a competition to serve the people, not a battlefield to gain power.” Khamenei went on to say: “The upcoming elections will be full of achievements and the repercussions will be felt in the world. Therefore, these elections are very important.”
The six-person shortlist was a surprise because the name of an independent politician supported by the reformist faction, Masoud Pezeshkian, was on the final list of approved candidates. This was due to the objective of the system (“nezam”) to focus on popular participation rather than the succession of the supreme leader, as was the case in the last presidential election in 2021. As part of the electoral engineering process, former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif was used as a tool to attract voters to the poll. The moderate candidate’s team targeted specific parts of the electorate, namely Iranian women, ethnic minorities and Generation Z.
Pezeshkian was the most suitable candidate to achieve this objective. He eventually won the Iranian presidential runoff election on Friday. After his election, he said that he had to thank Khamenei: “Without him, my name would not have come out of the polls.” Indeed, the Guardian Council had previously barred him from standing in March’s parliamentary elections due to his criticism of the political system at the time of Mahsa Amini’s killing.
He was barred from standing in March’s parliamentary elections due to his criticism of the political system
Dr. Mohammed Al-Sulami
According to official Iranian sources, Pezeshkian received more than 16 million votes in the runoff, while his opponent, ultraconservative hard-liner Saeed Jalili, received about 13.5 million. The Iranian Election Headquarters announced that voter turnout in the runoff was 49.8 percent, about 10 percent up from the first round held a week earlier.
Pezeshkian will propose a new diplomatic platform of direct nuclear negotiations with the West. This will depend on Khamenei’s support and the US president’s willingness to engage with Tehran at a time of confrontation in the Middle East and while Iran is supporting Russia militarily in the context of the war in Ukraine. Pezeshkian said that he was supporting a more proactive engagement policy toward Western actors and endorsed a return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal throughout his campaign.
This election indicates that Khamenei has prioritized regime survival in the face of rising internal discontent. This is why, anticipating a low turnout, the regime authorized the candidacy of a reformist, though weak and not very charismatic, among the six candidates for the post of president. The system has manipulated the electoral competition, which allows it, at least in the short term, to manage the crisis of legitimacy after the protest movement of 2022.
The main idea behind the presence of a moderate politician in the list of presidential candidates was to co-opt discontent by creating a semi-opposition responsible for countering a more vocal opposition to the Islamic Republic that is located outside the country. The system used the same strategy in 2013, after the crushing of the Green Movement — a post-election protest movement born from civil society after the fraudulent reelection in 2009 of the principlist politician Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In 2013, the pragmatic centrist politician Hassan Rouhani ran and was elected.
This election indicates that Khamenei has prioritized regime survival in the face of rising internal discontent
Dr. Mohammed Al-Sulami
This time, the regime’s strategy was not totally successful. The participation rate was less than 50 percent, which means that the boycott campaign of Iranian opponents both outside and inside the country was not fully crushed by the system. The idea of the presence of a moderate politician in the second round of the presidential election was not sufficient to mobilize the majority of the Iranian electorate.
There are now two options for the new Iranian president. Pezeshkian may not fulfill his promises made to the Iranian electorate if he chooses to remain faithful to the system. Alternatively, he could become a dissident if he tries to defy the authority of the supreme leader to apply his electoral program. Indeed, a large part of the Iranian youth did not vote for the moderate politician, even if they admit to having feared the rise to power of a hard-liner like Jalili, who was presented as a scarecrow.
Overall, the election of Pezeshkian represents a limited but real change promoted by the top-level authority in the Islamic Republic: the Office of the Supreme Leader. Indeed, without the approval of the supreme leader, the election of Pezeshkian would not have been possible. From this perspective, external pressures and internal discontent were the key factors behind Khamenei’s decision to promote the election of a moderate president, who will focus on internal issues in general and on improving the economic situation of the country in particular.
Pezeshkian’s desire to transform Iran into an emerging country remains linked to his ability to transform the Iranian political system. The new president needs to go beyond Rouhani’s nuclear policy, which achieved only a limited lifting of sanctions. This ambitious economic project will hurt the economic interests of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and it remains to be seen if this policy can be successful without a Democrat winning the US presidency in November.
- Dr. Mohammed Al-Sulami is the founder and president of the International Institute for Iranian Studies (Rasanah). X: @mohalsulami
