While Americans are inundated with news in regards to the seemingly never-ending election campaign between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, several other elections took place last week.
In the UK, Labour defeated the Tories to take power after 14 years in opposition. In France, President Emmanuel Macron was given a small reprieve after his party and a coalition of leftists joined forces to forestall Marine Le Pen's far-right Rassemblement National from gaining control of the French National Assembly.
But probably the most interesting election, with probably the most surprising final result, took place in Iran, a rustic not exactly known totally free and fair democratic processes. A little bit-known reformist lawmaker, Masoud Pezeshkian, defeated a pillar of Iran's conservative political establishment by a whopping 3 million votes. What many had expected to be one other tightly controlled election through which the conservative candidate would win handily turned out as a substitute to be a transparent rejection of the system at large.
Faced with the alternative of either voting for ultra-conservative hardliner Saeed Jalili, known for his theological tirades, or a politician who advocates easing social restrictions and opening as much as the West, greater than 16 million Iranian voters selected the latter.
Sudden alternative
Not much is thought about Pezeshkian and his politics. A heart surgeon, health minister under former reformist President Mohammad Khatami, and a member of parliament for nearly 20 years, Pezeshkian sought the office despite great difficulties. In fact, he knows firsthand how difficult it’s to interrupt into Iran's national political scene; in 2021, he was barred from running for president by the Guardian Council, an unelected body of jurists, clerics, and officials appointed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to be certain that candidates are staunch supporters of the Islamic Republic. That presidential campaign was a staged affair, with the sphere clear for Ebrahim Raisi, Khamenei's loyal protégé, to assume the presidency.
However, Raisi's death in a helicopter crash in May meant that Iran had to arrange elections in a brief time period. Again, many candidates were barred from running, but Pezeshkian was allowed to run. Khamenei likely wanted more Iranians to vote after voter turnout was so low within the last election. In the 2024 parliamentary election earlier this 12 months, only 41% of Iranians solid their ballots, a dismal figure that caused considerable concern to the Supreme Leader's Office. Allowing a reform-minded candidate would presumably encourage more Iranians – particularly within the cities and amongst young people – to participate. If that was the aim, it worked to some extent – about 50% of eligible voters participated.
Pezeshkian was also a protected bet. Although he ran as a moderate candidate in search of to limit the morality police, the nice doctor is hardly a reformist revolutionary. In fact, Pezeshkian is a product of the system and has been an energetic participant in it because the mid-Nineties, when he was first appointed deputy foreign minister under the Khatami government. While his old boss Khatami enjoyed shaking up the Islamic Republic's political system within the hopes of creating it more democratic (Khatami was thwarted by Khamenei and the safety services), Pezeshkian is more cautious and seems to know that an Iranian leader is not going to get far unless he’s incredibly patient. He must also play his role and reaffirm his loyalty to the supreme leader and the Islamic Republic as an entire, something Pezeshkian did continuously during his transient presidential campaign.
Energetic campaign
Nevertheless, the long-serving MP said all the best things through the election campaign. In particular, through the presidential debates he stressed that it was absolutely unacceptable for cops to beat women because they dressed a certain way. He berated the Raisi government (without naming it) as an incompetent bunch that couldn't even talk its way out of a paper bag. He berated his opponent Jalili for being completely unfit to steer anything, let alone a rustic whose economy is constrained by US sanctions, whose currency is losing value and where inflation is around 40 percent. And he mocked Jalili for making economic guarantees that he didn’t have the obligatory experience to maintain.
Pezeshkian also disagreed on foreign policy issues. Unlike Jalili, a former nuclear negotiator who blocked diplomacy during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidency, Pezeshkian argued that Iran could only revive its economy if it resumed nuclear talks with the United States so as to lift Washington's sanctions. Not surprisingly, Pezeshkian's most vocal supporter was Mohammad Javad Zarif, a former Iranian foreign minister who was instrumental in getting the 2015 Iran nuclear deal across the finish line.
Iran could have some interesting years ahead.
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