Four lessons from the Iranian presidential elections

Iranian voters showed their disillusionment with Iran’s system of clerical rule in the country’s presidential election on Friday, turning out in record numbers to help two establishment candidates reach a runoff.

The runoff on July 5 will offer voters a final choice between a reformist former Health Minister, Dr. Masoud Pezeshkian, and an ultra-conservative former nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, neither of whom managed to get more than the 50 percent of the vote needed to win the election. presidency. That postpones for another week the question of who will guide Iran through challenges, including an ailing economy, the divide between rulers and ruled and a nearby war that Iran increasingly threatens to engulf.

But despite belonging to two different camps, neither is expected to bring about major changes in Iran. After all, they must govern with the ultimate approval of Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

These are the key takeaways from Friday’s election.

Iranians continue to reject the system.

Only 40 percent of eligible Iranians voted Friday, according to government figures, a historically low turnout for an Iranian presidential race — even lower than the 41 percent level reported for this year’s Iranian parliamentary elections.

Although Iranian elections used to draw enthusiastic crowds, in recent years more and more people have stayed home in protest against the ruling elite, accusing those in power of ruining the economy, suppressing social and political freedoms and isolating Iran from the world.

In the 2013 presidential elections, large numbers of urban middle-class Iranians, longing for prosperity and a more open society, placed their trust in a reformist candidate, Hassan Rouhani. They hoped he would ease social and political restrictions and strike a deal that would lift the penalties of Western sanctions in return for limiting their country’s nuclear activities.

Mr. Rouhani made that deal only so that President Donald J. Trump could unilaterally withdraw from it and reimpose sanctions in 2018, sending Iran’s economy — which analysts say has also suffered from the mismanagement and corruption of Iran’s leaders — into another downward spiral.

And the social freedoms that Iranians won under Rouhani’s presidency when law enforcement officials looked the other way — including a relaxed dress code that allowed more and more Iranian women to drop their mandatory headscarves to their shoulders — evaporated after Mr. Rouhani’s election in 2021. Rouhani’s successor, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardliner who died in a helicopter crash last month.

Seeing that voting for reformers could not bring about lasting change, Iranians turned away from the ballot box and against the system. Their anger reached new heights in 2022, when months of nationwide anti-government protests erupted after a young woman, Mahsa Amini, died in police custody. As enforcement of the law requiring modest dress increased under Raisi, she had been arrested for wearing her headscarf incorrectly.

What can happen in the drain?

Voters remain skeptical that any candidate can bring about real change, even one who has been as openly critical of the government as Dr. Pezeshkian, the reformist candidate. So despite many voters’ disillusionment with the current conservative-dominated government, it is far from certain that they will support Dr. Pezeshkian in the second round.

One reason Dr. Pezeshkian made it to the second round despite being the only reformer in a crowded field was that the other two main candidates were both hardliners who split the conservative vote. Mr. Jalili, the more ideologically rigid of the two, is not certain to win over voters from his former conservative rival, since early polls showed that many of them were not interested in supporting Mr. Jalili.

However, that could change after rival Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf called on his supporters on Saturday to vote for Jalili and secure a conservative victory.

Overall, the powerful ruling establishment, led by Mr. Khamenei, appears to favor Mr. Jalili winning. Mr. Khamenei is personally close to Mr. Jalili and shares his hardline views, and he has recently indirectly criticized Dr. Pezeshkian for being too close to the West. The fact that the clerical council vetting presidential candidates allowed five conservatives to stand alongside one reformist indicated that the supreme leader wanted a lieutenant who would embrace a similar agenda.

Does it matter?

In the Iranian system, the Supreme Leader makes the biggest decisions, especially on weighty issues like nuclear negotiations and foreign policy. But the president can set the tone, as Mr. Rouhani did in his push for a nuclear deal with the West.

Whoever becomes president will likely have a freer hand in managing issues such as social restrictions — not just the enforcement of the mandatory headscarf, which has become an ongoing flashpoint between Iran’s rulers and the Iranian people, but also sensitive issues such as the whether singers are allowed to perform on stage. .

He will also have some influence on the country’s economic policy. Inflation has soared in recent years and the value of Iran’s currency has plummeted, making life a grueling struggle for Iranians who have seen the value of their salaries and savings melt away. Fresh fruit, vegetables and meat have become difficult to afford for many.

However, efforts to revive the economy will not be enough if Iran continues to suffer under US and European sanctions, which restrict Iran’s vital oil sales and banking transactions.

What does this mean for the crisis in the Middle East and Iran’s nuclear program?

Outside Iran, all eyes are on where the country’s foreign and nuclear policy will go.

Iran is a key player in the conflict that continues to threaten to spill over from Gaza, where Iran’s arch-enemy Israel is waging a bloody war to eradicate Hamas, to the broader Middle East. Iran has supported, funded and armed not only Hamas but also Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia on Israel’s northern border that Israel has used repeatedly in recent months to launch deadly attacks.

While that violence has not yet spread to war, in part because Iran does not want to be drawn into a broader conflict, Israel has recently tightened its tone and warned that it could shift its focus from Gaza to Lebanon. And Iran and Israel are no longer limiting their hostilities to proxy fighting or covert attacks: the two sides this year carried out open, if limited, attacks on each other’s territory.

It is also unclear what the election of a new president will mean for the West’s longstanding efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear program. Six years after Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the original nuclear deal, Iran is now closer than ever to being able to produce several nuclear weapons. And after decades of insisting that its nuclear program is entirely peaceful, some top Iranian leaders are publicly claiming that recent missile exchanges with Israel mean Iran should embrace building a bomb.