Iranians are being urged to turn out in large numbers to elect a new president on Friday, in a vote that Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has depicted as a referendum on his regime’s legitimacy.
In a speech punctuated with chants of “death to America, death to Israel,” the ageing supreme leader told supporters that what mattered most in the election was “maximum participation”, and then the “correct choice” of candidate.
Khamenei has every reason to be worried about a low turnout. The election was hastily scheduled after President Raisi, a hardline cleric, died in a helicopter crash in last month.
In March, parliamentary elections in Iran had a turnout of 41 per cent, the lowest since the republic was founded in 1979. Conservative candidates dominated after a majority of reformists were excluded, but the low participation shook the Ayatollah.
“People’s participation is the essence of the Islamic Republic,” he said in the speech on Tuesday. “In every election where the turnout was low, the enemies launched their verbal attacks.”
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His regime is now asking Iranians, who are reeling from inflation of more than 40 per cent and high unemployment, to set aside their cynicism and pick one of the six candidates who have been vetted by Khamenei, 85, and his Guardian Council of clerics and jurists.
Sanam Vakil, director of the Middle East and North Africa programme at the Chatham House think tank, said: “This is an election for the system to show that their processes still work, and it’s an election that can show potentially that the republican part of the system is still effective.”
For many, it is no choice at all, as the lacklustre presidential debates illustrated. Five of the candidates are hardliners and one, Masoud Pezeshkian, 69, a doctor and former health minister, is considered a reformer.
All of them professed loyalty to Khamenei and his strict Islamic regime and would not have been allowed to run otherwise. They all promised to improve the economy, which has been crippled by western sanctions, and fight the rampant corruption in the country.
Many Iranians doubt that the next president, who will essentially serve as the supreme leader’s elected factotum, can bring about any meaningful change.
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Unsurprisingly, there have been calls for another boycott of the election, including from inmates of the notorious Evin prison in Tehran. Narges Mohammadi, the Nobel laureate and human rights activist who has been jailed since 2010, described the elections as a sham.
She wrote in a letter from Evin: “How can you, while holding a sword, gallows, weapons and prisons against the people with one hand, place a ballot box in front of the same people with the other hand, and deceitfully and falsely call them to the polls?”
Hundreds of teachers and activists have signed a letter calling for a boycott, and many Iranians expressed their opposition to the vote in messages on Twitter/X with the hashtag ElectionCircus.
“Participation in the elections, even under the assumption of a victory by a reformist candidate, is futile, offering no resolution to ongoing issues,” the letter said. “It risks bolstering [the regime’s] legitimacy and intensifying suppression of dissent and protest.”
Khamenei called on his supporters to avoid picking a candidate who thinks “that all paths to progress pass through the United States”, a possible rebuke to Pezeshkian, who favours diplomacy as a means to ease the sanctions.
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Pezeshkian has picked Mohammad Javad Zarif as his foreign affairs adviser. Zarif served as foreign minister under the former president Hassan Rouhani, a reformist who signed a 2015 deal with the US and other countries that restricted its nuclear activities in return for sanctions relief.
Pezeshkian, who is now seen as a lead contender along with the hardline general and parliamentary speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, was barred from running in the 2021 election that brought Raisi to power. His inclusion this time appears calculated to boost the turnout from voters who are more likely to vote for a reformist than abstain.
Ali Vaez, director of the Iran project at the International Crisis Group think tank, said: “It does appear that after three lacklustre elections in the past three years the regime has come to the conclusion that it needs to take some action to improve the participation rate that has always been seen as a pillar to its legitimacy.
“Approving a reformist candidate was precisely to meet that goal.”
While many Iranians see little difference between the candidates, Vaez said a victory for Pezeshkian could take the edge off some of the regime’s most extreme policies, two years after its brutal crackdown on protests led by women opposed to its hardline Islamist restrictions.
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The parliament has since passed a law imposing harsher penalties on women who refuse to wear the hijab headscarf, and the morality police have resumed efforts to intimidate and detain thousands of offenders.
“The hijab laws were not enforced as rigorously under Rouhani as was the case under Raisi,” said Vaez. “In terms of foreign policy the tone and personalities do matter The Rouhani administration was much more competent managing foreign affairs than the Raisi administration.”
The differences, however, may not persuade many Iranians to vote, even under the reformist Rouhani, protests were brutally quelled and dissidents were jailed.
The president has little say over foreign policy, which includes Iran’s support for a network of militias in the region including Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, who are fighting a conflict with Israel that almost brought Iran and Israel to war in April.
He will also have no say over Iran’s nuclear programme, which has accelerated since Donald Trump, then the US president, withdrew from the nuclear treaty in 2018.
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“Domestically nothing improved after the [treaty to ease sanctions] which provided a quarter of Iran’s GDP in cash in unfrozen assets, and abroad that money went into Iran’s foreign policy adventures,” Shay Khatiri, a senior fellow at Yorktown Institute, said. “The pragmatic/reformist camp is not really going to change policy, whether inside Iran or Iran’s foreign policy.”
