Vali Nasr and Narges Bajoghli
In 2021, Iran’s hard-line elites were triumphant. Their chosen candidate, Ebrahim Raisi, had won the country’s carefully staged election with more than 70 percent of the vote. Conservatives were in control of the Iranian parliament, and they had the full attention of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Their goal—controlling all the country’s levers of power in order to make Islamist revolutionary fervor its perpetual mainstay—was within reach.
But by the end of the following year, it was clear their agenda was in trouble. The economy was in free fall, and the hard-liners were failing at the basic tasks of governance. The domain in which they appeared most effective—enforcing mandatory veiling for women—was making the state deeply unpopular. When a young woman named Mahsa Amini died at the hands of the morality police in September 2022, after being arrested for not wearing her hijab properly, Iran was racked with protests. Iranian women made it clear they were tired of the state’s dress code and legal control over their bodies. Staggering inflation and shrinking economic opportunities further infuriated Iranians, young and old. The hard-liners seemed to have transformed nagging dissent into open revolt. And so in May, after Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash, Khamenei saw a chance to correct course. Unlike in 2021, Khamenei allowed a reformist, the parliamentarian Masoud Pezeshkian, to run for president. Khamenei knew that if reformists were excluded, voter turnout would be anemic, leading to another spate of unified hard-line control that would erode the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic. Pezeshkian then managed to secure a comfortable, if not overwhelming, victory.
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