Same old, same old at the top in Iran
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Iran will have a new president next month as, under the terms of the country’s constitution, the incumbent Hassan Rouhani cannot run for a third stint in the June 18 election.
A total of 592 individuals have registered for the country’s 13th presidential election, most of whom are not well known in Iran’s political sphere. More than 90 percent of those registered will not be allowed to run for the presidency under the Guardian Council’s new rules. The council, an unelected body that vets the candidates, has specified that “all nominees must be between 40 and 70 years of age, hold at least a master’s degree or its equivalent, have work experience of at least four years in managerial posts… and have no criminal record,” according to Iran’s state-run Press TV. The council has also said it will review only 40 applicants’ qualifications.
The Guardian Council will probably allow the following individuals to run: Saeed Jalili, a former secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and the regime’s nuclear negotiator; Mohsen Rezaee, the secretary of the Expediency Discernment Council and a senior military officer; former Defense Minister Hossein Dehghan; Mohammed Shariatmadari, the current minister of cooperatives, labor and social welfare; Chief Justice Ebrahim Raisi; Ali Larijani, a former officer in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and an ex-parliamentary speaker; and Rouhani’s Vice President Eshagh Jahangiri.
Presidential candidates will take part in debates shown by state-owned media outlets. But we should not expect heated debates with divergent views or verbal attacks, as we have seen during previous presidential election campaigns. This is partially because the Guardian Council can disqualify candidates even after allowing them to run for the presidency. This will undoubtedly make the candidates more cautious about what they say during the campaign, particularly when it comes to criticizing the system.
Of the individuals mentioned above, Jahangiri, Raisi and Larijani are expected to be the frontrunners. All three have run for the presidency before and they appeal to different bases in Iran.
Larijani is attempting to project himself as being similar to the late Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. He is trying to appeal to Rafsanjani’s base as well as the moderates by prioritizing the economy and by showing that he is a pragmatist. On his 10-point agenda, he stipulates that “the main goal of foreign policy must be facilitating foreign relations in order to advance the country’s economy.”
Jahangiri, Raisi and Larijani have run for the presidency before and they appeal to different bases in Iran.
Dr. Majid Rafizadeh
Jahangiri is characterized as a “reformist” within Iran’s political spectrum. He will appeal to both the moderate and reformist camps. He has occasionally been a vocal critic of the hard-liners. During the last presidential election campaign, he pointed out: “There’s a movement called the reformist movement and you’ve deprived them of all rights and now you are saying that they shouldn’t even have a candidate.” He also harshly criticized former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hard-line administration, stating: “They confined everyone to their houses. They earned $700 billion, they took it, they spent it and they left nothing, just unemployment.”
He was a political activist in his early twenties during the 1979 revolution. He later studied industrial management and became the governor of Isfahan province. Under the reformist President Mohammed Khatami, Jahangiri served as minister of industries and mines from 1997 to 2005. Under Rouhani, he has served as first vice president.
Jahangiri is clearly not the supreme leader or the IRGC’s favorite candidate. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei once implicitly blamed him for Iran’s currency crisis, saying: “Most of the people are after the person who has received the foreign currency or gold coins, whereas a huge portion of the blame lies with the individual who has provided the foreign currency or gold coins with imprudence. The recent measures of the judiciary are in fact aimed at dealing with people who paved the ground for these issues and a drop in the value of the national currency through violation and a great mistake.”
In addition, many young people have become disillusioned with the reformists and Rouhani’s administration because the government has failed to deliver on its economic promises. The country is experiencing among the worst unemployment rates, levels of inflation and currency devaluations in its history. Human rights violations and crackdowns on protests have also increased during the Rouhani-Jahangiri administration.
Finally, Raisi is probably Khamenei’s favorite candidate and possibly even his preferred successor as supreme leader. He has a large base among the hard-liners and conservatives. Raisi was appointed by Khamenei to serve as the head of Iran’s judiciary.
So the presidential election will probably be a race between Raisi and Larijani, who are both close confidants and loyalists to Khamenei.
- Dr. Majid Rafizadeh is a Harvard-educated Iranian-American political scientist. Twitter: @Dr_Rafizadeh
