The Long Road to Reform

MASOUD PEZESHKIAN, a 69-year-old cardiac surgeon, an ethnic Azeri Turk and a reformist parliamentarian from Tabriz, pulled off an upset win in a runoff with hardliner Saeed Jalili. Hardly anyone had imagined that a snap presidential election in Iran would reverse the ongoing trend of conservative consolidation of all branches of power— presidency, parliament, and judiciary. In 2018, the Trump administration’s unilateral withdrawal from the nuclear agreement and nationwide protests triggered by fuel subsidy cuts severely weakened the moderate Hassan Rouhani government. Since then, the Guardian Council, a conservative-dominated vetting body, has been systematically disqualifying a majority of reformist and moderate candidates in parliamentary and presidential elections. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei has decried reformists and moderates, saying those calling for the Islamic Republic to “normalise” itself—in other words, to move closer to international norms—were essentially rejecting revolutionary principles in the name of transformation. Instead, he entrusted loyal conservatives like the late Ebrahim Raisi to work in tandem with the Revolutionary Guards to build a “Strong Iran” that would stand up to “arrogant powers” and protect the political system from “subversives” within.

As the elections were reduced to a contest within the conser­vative camp, the voter turnout plummeted. The March 2024 parliament election recorded a turnout of 41 per cent, the lowest in Iran’s electoral history. In protest against disqualifications restricting voter choice, former reformist President Muhammad Khatami boycotted recent elections. Amid the “Women, Life, Freedom” protests, Green Movement leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, who has been under house arrest since 2011, called for a referendum on Iran’s political system and drafting of a new democratic constitution. Rouhani, who was disqualified from running for a seat in the Assembly of Experts that elects the Supreme Leader, criticised the shrinking political space as the “rule of minority”. The disengagement of a majority of the population and elites from the electoral process was an alarming sign for a political system that has been under siege from its very birth. Furthermore, the months-long protest against mandatory hijab, triggered by the death of a young Mahsa Amini in the custody of the morality police in September 2022, under­scored the deep divide between the secular, liberal aspirations of Iran’s Gen-Z and a political system they unequivocally equate with dictatorship. No sooner had a sustained violent crackdown quietened the street than Iran was mired in another round of regional confrontation, this time with Israel. A section of the population, especially the youth, who have felt disenfranchised and therefore disengaged from the electoral process, came to believe that accumulated crises within Iran and pressures from outside may lead to a radical alternative to the status quo. But the notion that the Islamic Republic will crack with one more push may no longer hold the same weight. Mohammad Fazeli, a prominent sociologist, who lost his university job in a purge and joined Pezeshkian’s campaign as an adviser, points out that the political system survived the US “maximum pressure” campaign and widespread protests of 2022. Iran’s launching of a direct mis­sile attack on Israeli soil did not invite a response from the US and this may have led many to draw the conclusion that the country cannot be brought to heel despite high levels of internal tensions, sanctions and foreign attacks.

In this context, the approval of Pezeshkian, a five-term parliamentarian, who served as minister of health and medi­cal education under Khatami, and was disqualified in the 2021 presidential election, has unexpectedly brought reformists back to the political arena. Since nearly two decades ago, when the Reform Movement brought Khatami to presidency, the reform­ists have offered a democratic political imagination of a pluralist civil society and cultural liberalisation, which appealed to the middle class. In contrast to the conservative Islamist conception of politics as a moral conflict between opposing identities and civilisations, the reformists called for enrichment through inter­action and dialogue with others. However, this reformist vision of peaceful evolutionary change lost out against a strong backlash from conservatives and the military-security apparatus, who saw the liberalisation agenda and engagement with the West as the work of “seditionists” striking at the core of the revolutionary political system. When the US reneged on the nuclear agreement negotiated by the moderate Rouhani, it ignored the reality of factional struggle in Iran in favour of a hostile posture against the Islamic Republic. While a hardliner presidency like that of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Ebrahim Raisi successfully projected Iran as a fountainhead of resistance against the US and Israel and ruthlessly dealt with internal challenges, it is understood that only reformists can soothe frayed nerves inside Iran and seek an opening with enemies. In a bid to attract alienated voters, Pezeshkian adopted “Baraye Iran (For Iran)”, the anthem of the recent protests, as his campaign slogan. During the campaign, he criticised Jalili’s track record as chief nuclear negotiator under Ahmadinejad by saying diplomacy is not about an uncompromising stance and revolutionary slogans. While linking it to securing peoples’ livelihood, and a positive face for Iran, he said that “negotiations are not humiliating for me.”

Still, the manoeuvre to open the contest to reformists largely failed to attract the grey voters—a term for reform-minded indi­viduals who usually don’t cast their ballot. The Iranian diaspora in the West, especially monarchists, ran a well-resourced boycott campaign equating voting with “cooperation with an oppres­sive regime.” However, the internal boycott, in the words of several imprisoned rights activists, was a “form of civil resistance to achieve free elections.” The surprise element in the first round was that even at a historically low voter turnout of 40 per cent, Pezeshkian maintained a lead of nearly one million votes over Jalili. The conventional wisdom has been that reformist pros­pects depend on high turnout. The most plausible explanation is a shift of conservative votes to Pezeshkian. Jalili and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the two lead conservative candidates, together garnered 12.8 million votes, a decline of 5.2 million from the 2021 elections when Raisi emerged victorious while facing no serious challenger. Pezeshkian maintained a wide lead over the conservatives in the three northwestern provinces, where the majority of Azeris comprising 16 per cent of Iran’s total population live. Pezeshkian’s campaign focus on addressing the longstanding neglect of border areas and ensuring the inclusion of Sunni Muslims and ethnic minorities in government posts may have helped in making inroads into traditionally conser­vative votes in these regions. Pezeshkian also benefited from intra-factional rivalries among the conservatives. A downside of concentration of power within the conservative camp has been an intensive infighting between mainstream conservatives and an ascendant, younger generation of hardliners. Notably, an intervention by IRGC Quds Force Commander Esmaeil Qa’ani failed to convince either Jalili or Ghalibaf to withdraw. In defeat, Ghalibaf extended support to Jalili, but many of his supporters backed Pezeshkian instead.

The Pezeshkian-Jalili runoff was a showdown between two polar opposite visions for the future of the country. Pezeshkian’s supporters painted a dystopian image of a Jalili presidency as living under Taliban. The 10 per cent increase in voter turnout is being widely seen as a no to Jalili’s brand of politics based on revolutionary slogans detached from the reality of people’s lives. At no point during his campaign did Pezeshkian project himself as the next messiah. He acknowledged the hardships, weaknesses afflicting the system, and emphasised that solu­tions need expertise and efficiency rather than ideological pieties. At the same time, Pezeshkian knows that any meaning­ful change at the domestic or external front will require that he doesn’t antagonise the conservative-dominated parliament and parallel institutions headed by Khamenei. Only time will tell if Pezeshkian, the surgeon, can save Iran by suturing the fault­lines inside and building bridges outside.

AyatollahgeopoliticsGreen MovementIranIranian President-Elect Masoud PezeshkianMir Hossein MousaviSunni Muslims