Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar
On July 5, the parliamentarian Masoud Pezeshkian prevailed in Iran’s snap presidential election. It was a surprising win. Pezeshkian is a relative moderate who pledged to engage with the West, end Internet filtering, and cease the morality police’s harassment of women—a program not endorsed by the country’s clerical elite. Instead, Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei wanted a president in the mold of Pezeshkian’s hard-line predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a May helicopter accident. As a result, most experts believed that Khamenei would maneuver to ensure the election of another proven conservative. As I wrote in Foreign Affairs shortly after the helicopter crash, “Iran’s next president will almost certainly be just like its last.”
But although Pezeshkian may hold different views from Raisi, in practice, his government may operate much like his predecessor’s. Iran’s new president, like its last, is devoted to the Islamic Republic’s structure and identity. During his campaign, he did not promise sweeping shifts: long gone are the days when Iranian presidential candidates proposed lofty visions for promoting democracy, civil society, human rights, and rapprochement with the United States. Instead, Pezeshkian worked to prove that he was the candidate most capable of executing policies set by Khamenei. He pledged fealty, again and again, to the supreme leader. He rejected the reformist-conservative dichotomy, stating that he did not belong to any political camp. Perhaps that is why, although the election featured candidates with supposedly different views, voter turnout was historically low. Only 40 percent of people participated in the first round, and just 49 percent turned out for the second. In the 1997 election, by contrast, the reformist won 70 percent of the ballots in an election where 80 percent of eligible Iranians voted.
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