Iran’s supreme leader is terrified of people power

The Economist-June30th2024

Ahead of the first round of Iran’s presidential election on June 28th, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s supreme leader, said that any vote was a vote for his Islamic Republic. By that test the poll raises deep questions about the decaying regime’s legitimacy. Some 60% of the country’s 61m-strong electorate have withheld their vote, resulting in the lowest turnout on record. The streets of Tehran, the capital, were uncannily quiet on polling day with many people dismissing the exercise as a farce in a country being ruined by dictatorship. Instead of queues outside polling stations, election monitors slept at their desks in empty mosques.

Don’t mistake calm for stability, however. The system is still reeling from the mysterious death of the presidential incumbent, Ebrahim Raisi, in a helicopter crash on May 19th. And the surprise results mean a second round will take place on July 5th, which could further expose the fissures in Iranian society and the fragility of the regime.

Iran’s political system is a hybrid that mixes elements of democracy, military rule and religious authority. The clerics and military commanders who dominate the system had looked to Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf as their candidate. He is a stalwart of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the clerical authorities’ praetorian guard. Yet he came in third place and is now out of the race.

In the lead with 10.4m votes is Masoud Pezeshkian, a 69-year-old surgeon who was a health minister in a reform-leaning government two decades ago. He has decried the regime’s corruption and brutal enforcement of the mandatory veil and called for engagement with the West. He has the backing of a reformist bloc hoping for a comeback. Behind him stand Jawad Zarif, the foreign minister who negotiated a nuclear deal with America and others in 2015; and two former presidents, Muhammad Khatami and Hassan Rouhani.

At his heels with 9.5m votes is Saeed Jalili, a 58-year-old zealot who looks a decade older than he is. Mr Jalili blames Iran’s economic malaise on sanctions and calls for confrontation with America and engagement with Russia and China. He denounces anyone seeking social liberalisation as a counter-revolutionary. He has the backing of the Paydari (or Stabilisation) Front, a growing movement of the militantly religious right. He was wounded in the Iran-Iraq war and graduated from Imam Sadiq, a university-cum-seminary in Tehran. He wrote his doctorate on the Prophet Muhammad’s diplomacy and, as a former chief negotiator on the nuclear file, took pride in his refusal to compromise. Such is his religious extremism that even the regime’s pragmatic top brass feel unsettled.

A riveting second round could now unfold. Both candidates still have much to prove. Mr Jalili received only half the votes Mr Raisi won in the election of 2021. Meanwhile Mr Pezeshkian has not convinced many prominent reformers. They include Mir Hossein Moussavi, the presidential candidate who lost the rigged presidential election of 2009 and remains under house arrest, and Faezeh Hashemi Rafsanjani, the daughter of a former president. Mr Pezeshkian is a “wet blanket”, says a boycotter who once voted for reformists, but now deems the former minister too little too late.