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IRAN’S SUPREME LEADER IS WORRIED  
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Arash Azizi
July 10, 2024
The Atlantic
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_ Why else would he bring his political rivals back in from the cold?
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Masoud Pezeshkian, President-elect of Iran, Wikipedia

 

Iran has taken a turn that hardly anyone could have seen coming a few
short months ago. For years, Iran’s reformist faction has languished
in the political wilderness, banished there by hard-liners more
aligned with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and by a
disillusioned electorate convinced that its votes did not matter. Few
imagined this year that the reformists were about to make a comeback
and elect a president for the first time since 2001. Yet on July 5,
this is precisely what happened.

Masud Pezeshkian, a physician and longtime member of Parliament,
defeated the ultra-hard-liner Saeed Jalili in a runoff with 54.8
percent of the vote. Turnout was extraordinarily low in the first
round and only somewhat higher in the second, according to the
official numbers—meaning that Pezeshkian will become president with
a smaller share of eligible voters than any other president in the
history of the Islamic Republic. For many of those who did come out,
the main motivation was not love for Pezeshkian, but fear of his
rival.

In effect, Iranian citizens sent two negative messages this election
week: Those who didn’t vote demonstrated their rejection of the
regime and its uninspiring choices. Those who did vote said no to
Jalili, who represented the hard core of the regime and its extremist
agenda.

Khamenei could have avoided this outcome by simply not allowing
Pezeshkian to run. The Guardian Council, an unelected body, vets all
candidates for office and is ultimately loyal to the supreme leader.
So why did Khamenei allow this election to become a binary choice
pitting Jalili, whose vision dovetails with his own, against a
representative of the reformist faction, which has proved more popular
time and again?

The choice is particularly baffling considering that Khamenei had, in
the past few years, finally achieved a long-standing dream: He had
managed to fully populate the regime with hard-line zealots who paid
him unquestioning obedience and shared his vision for an anti-West,
anti-Israel, and anti-woman theocracy. In 2021, Ebrahim Raisi, a
former hanging judge and an unimpressive lackey, was coronated
president in an uncompetitive election.

[Supporters of Masoud Pezeshkian attend a rally in Tehran, Iran, on
July 3, 2024. Right: Pezeshkian walks under a portrait of Supreme
Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, while attending to speak to the media
on June 1, 2024.]

(Morteza Nikoubazl / NurPhoto / Getty; Saman / Middle East Images /
AFP / Getty)

Before Raisi, every single one of the four presidents who served under
Khamenei ended up becoming the leader’s political nemesis. Now
Khamenei could say goodbye to all that. The Parliament, the judiciary,
the Supreme National Security Council, and all the other major bodies
of the regime, too, were dominated by conservatives and hard-liners in
the Raisi era. Not only reformists, who had traditionally favored
political liberalization, but even centrists, who adopted a pragmatic
rather than ideological foreign policy, were booted out of positions
of power. This past March, the Islamic Republic held probably its most
restrictive parliamentary elections ever, a competition largely
between conservatives and ultra-hard-liners. At long last, the
85-year-old Khamenei seemed to hold almost uncontested power.

So why would he jeopardize this state of affairs by allowing a
reformist into the presidential race?

Khamenei has to be aware that the societal base for his regime is only
shrinking. The mix of political repression and economic failure has
proved unsurprisingly unpopular. A majority of Iranians refused to
vote not only in this election but also in the three elections before
it, starting in 2020. Even the reformists joined an official boycott
this year, something normally more the province of young radicals and
abroad-based opposition. Tens of thousands of Iranians turned out for
street protests in 2017, 2019, and 2022–23, and hundreds were killed
in violent crackdowns all over the country.

The regime put down those demonstrations, but its leaders have to know
that they never addressed the problems that produced them. Millions of
women continue to engage in acts of daily civil disobedience by
refusing to abide by the mandatory-veiling policy. Prisons are filled
with political detainees, including former regime officials such as
Mostafa Tajzadeh, once a prominent reformist politician, and the
well-known filmmaker Jafar Panahi. A terrible economy, poor growth, an
ever-weakening currency, and skyrocketing inflation bedevil the
country. Khamenei may well have calculated that if he doesn’t change
tack, he’ll be due for no end of social explosions.

The regime’s international isolation may have also begun to feel
untenable. Under President Raisi, Iran reestablished diplomatic ties
with its historical foe Saudi Arabia and joined multilateral
organizations such as BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization.
Following Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Iran extended military
aid and expanded ties with Moscow. But only a deal with the West can
provide respite from the sanctions that are squeezing Iran’s
economy. Even dealings with anti-Western countries, such as China, are
hampered by those restrictions, which complicate all of Iran’s
financial transactions. (On the campaign trail, Pezeshkian complained
that China has demanded enormous discounts on oil as the price of
doing business under the sanctions.) The Raisi administration held
secret talks with the Biden administration, but they came to little.
Now the possibility of Donald Trump’s return may be focusing
Khamenei’s mind on this problem.

The regional situation surely also factored in. Iran’s shadow war
with Israel, which turned to direct mutual attacks in April, is at
risk of escalating, and Khamenei may feel that managing it will
require subtlety. Fundamentalists like Jalili are great for
grandstanding speeches—less so for delicate international
negotiations. Here, too, West-facing figures—such as Javad Zarif,
the former foreign minister who was Pezeshkian’s top aide during the
campaign and is now the chair of his foreign-policy task force—once
again have something to offer the Islamic Republic.

Raisi’s death in a strange helicopter crash on May 19 provided the
opening for Khamenei to recalibrate his relationship with the
reformists and centrists. Pezeshkian was disqualified from running for
president in 2021. Earlier this year, he was denied even a
parliamentary run; Khamenei then personally intervened to allow him to
enter and win the race for the Tabriz seat he has held since 2008. For
this presidential election, he was the only one of three reformist
candidates to be approved.

That Pezeshkian_ _got the nod over the others is not an accident.
Having served as a health minister under former President Mohammad
Khatami, Pezeshkian has strong reformist credentials. He has often led
the minority reformist caucus in Parliament, and he gave a courageous
speech in 2009 condemning the harsh repression of that year’s Green
Movement. At the same time, however, he has demonstrated his loyalty
to the Islamic Republic. In 2019, the Trump administration designated
the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, and
Pezeshkian, then the deputy speaker of Parliament, donned the
militia’s green uniform for the cameras and proudly identified
himself with it. That same year, he celebrated IRGC’s downing of an
American drone.

As president-elect, Pezeshkian has already sought to reassure the
regime’s traditional partners. He wrote a letter to the Hezbollah
leader Hassan Nasrallah promising continued support for the
“resistance,” and he spoke by phone with Russian President
Vladimir Putin to pledge continued ties. The Kremlin must be feeling a
little antsy, given that many Iranian officials in the orbit of former
centrist President Hassan Rouhani, including Zarif, have expressed
open dislike for the regime’s recent break with Iran’s tradition
of nonalignment in order to orient the country toward Moscow.

Despite being nominally a reformist, Pezeshkian did not campaign for
any serious reforms this year. During the televised debates and on the
campaign trail, he professed more fealty to the supreme leader than
his hard-line rivals did. To compare this new reformist president with
the reformists of two decades ago—Khatami and his coterie imagined
marginalizing Khamenei and democratizing Iran—is frankly depressing.
Pezeshkian ran as a technocratic centrist, very much like his major
conservative rival, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, who, despite the support
of much of the IRGC’s high staff, failed to garner more than 13.8
percent of the vote in the first round. Pezeshkian was endorsed by
reformist grandees such as Khatami and the reformist cleric Mehdi
Karroubi, who has been under house arrest since 2011. And yet, his
campaign leads were mostly not reformists, but cabinet ministers from
the centrist Rouhani administration.

Still, some of Pezeshkian’s personal qualities made him an
attractive candidate, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of the
hard-line populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: Pezeshkian sports a humble,
plebeian look—he often wears a raincoat instead of a suit
jacket—and speaks in plain, straightforward language instead of the
jargon typical of Iranian politics.

The previous time a reformist won the presidency—Khatami, in 1997
and 2001—he did so on the back of a major social movement. Rouhani,
too, had a strong mandate behind him, which gave him ballast in
confronting the establishment hard-liners when he needed to.
Pezeshkian’s position is less secure, given last week’s anemic
turnout, and the institutions around him are controlled by
hard-liners. His fealty to Khamenei, and his lack of experience in
high politics, might also make him a meek match for the grand
ayatollah and his minions.

Pezeshkian will nonetheless be judged on at least three issues that
dominated the campaign: whether he can help loosen enforcement of the
compulsory hijab, relax restrictions on the internet, and, most
important, effect an opening with the West that could help lift
sanctions and improve the country’s economic outlook. On Saturday,
which is the first day of the week in Iran, Tehran’s stock index
jumped high, reflecting the market’s optimism about his prospects.
But whether he can realize such hopes, especially given the limited
power vested in Iran’s presidency, remains to be seen.

One wind blowing in Pezeshkian’s favor is the possibility of an
alliance with some sections of the IRGC. He already has something of a
tacit alliance with Qalibaf against the more extreme hard-line camp.
Earlier this year, Pezeshkian’s support helped Qalibaf win the
speakership of the Parliament. In the second round of the presidential
elections, Qalibaf dutifully endorsed Jalili, as a fellow
conservative, but he didn’t campaign for him, and many of his
supporters endorsed Pezeshkian instead. Can this alliance extend into
the Pezeshkian administration? And if so, how can the West-facing
policy favored by Rouhani and Zarif be reconciled with the IRGC’s
sponsorship of anti-Israel militias in the region, and the proximity
of certain segments of the IRGC to Russia? It is a truism that a
change in president won’t change Iran’s core policies, because
these are set by Khamenei. But the ever-shifting balance of power
among factions of the regime does_ _have policy consequences.

Iran’s democratic and civic movements will have to decide how to
navigate this rebirth of something like reform. During the election
cycle, prominent activists and political prisoners were divided over
whether to endorse Pezeshkian or call for boycotting the vote. Now
they will need to plot their moves under his new government, weighing
two competing impulses: to put demands on a possibly amenable
administration, or call for the overthrow of the regime.

As for the octogenarian dictator, these waning years of his life
resemble a Greek tragedy. Once a radical poet and a 1960s
revolutionary who dreamed of building a better world, he has ended up
overseeing a regime rife with corruption and incompetence, hated by
most of its populace. Even many establishment figures know that
revolutionary slogans won’t solve the country’s problems, hence
their turn to technocracy.

Lenin once admonished that those who want obedience will get only
obedient fools as followers. Khamenei never heeded that warning. Time
and again, he pushed out independent-minded but impressive figures in
favor of obedient fools. As he looks at the ragtag team of tinfoil-hat
conspiracists and dour fundamentalists that surrounds him today, he
must be somewhat embarrassed. Just five years ago, on the 40th
anniversary of the Islamic Revolution, he spoke of cultivating a
government dominated by “devout young revolutionaries.” By opening
up the political space to technocrats and centrists, he is perhaps
admitting the defeat of that dream.

_Arash Azizi [[link removed]] is a
contributing writer at The Atlantic and a senior lecturer in history
and political science at Clemson University. His new book, What
Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom
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was published in January 2024._

* Iran election
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* Masoud Pezeshkian
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* Rightwing
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* Defeating the Right
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