Hardliners gain control over Iranian politics.
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Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline Islamist chosen and protected by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, easily won the presidential elections. But his ostensible landslide appears to be a Pyrrhic victory, bringing nothing but obligatory family support to Iran via what is considered one of its worst crises since the 1979 revolution that created the Islamic Republic.
If this has become a test of faith for Iranians in their hybrid, hydra-headed apparatus, where theocrats and vested interests led through the supreme leader hang the whip on popularly elected institutions comparable to parliament and the presidency, then it has failed.
The 48.8 percent turnout was the lowest in the history of contested presidential elections in the Islamic Republic. Incumbent President Hassan Rouhani was re-elected with 24 million votes in 2017; Raisi bought 18 million. Now, not only did more than half of Iranians reject the ballot, but 3.7 million spoiled their ballots – more than voted for Raisi's weak opponents after theocrats banned plausible candidates.
In other words, the discontented majority in Iran opposes Raisi. The aspirations of a historical civilization, but with a young population, to rejoin the kingdom, which crystallized in Rouhani's two victories, can no longer find expression in elections where the results are predetermined using Khamenei and the clerics.
This is an issue Raisi will have little time to reflect on. Iran’s economic climate is prostrate after former US President Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 price cut Iran struck with the US and five other world powers to eliminate most of Tehran’s nuclear program. He imposed arguably the harshest sanctions ever imposed on a sovereign state. While Trump’s “ideal power” campaign didn’t bring Iran to its knees, it worked neatly politically for hardliners who used it as proof that the United States had become something undeniable.
However, leaders like Khamenei and Raisi cannot be complacent. Iran has experienced a normal insurgency at home and is fighting abroad to control what has become an axis of strength, but now it is a sequence of collapsing states in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen. This is especially true after the assassination of Qassem Soleimani, commander of the groundbreaking overseas legion, in Baghdad last year.
There are complications with someone like Raisi in the presidency, a clergyman who headed the judiciary for the past two years. There is speculation that he is linked to the executions of hundreds of political prisoners in 1988, a discipline he has avoided while reinventing himself as a populist anti-corruption activist. In contrast to Rouhani, architect of the 2015 nuclear agreement, he is below US sanctions.
President Joe Biden is attempting to revive the agreement and reverse Iran's uranium enrichment. Iran wants to protect itself against US sanctions that have deterred foreign investors with the potential dumping of the dollar device, despite the nuclear agreement. Furthermore, it wants the IRGC, a state body targeting a terrorist community with Trump's help, delisted. However, IRGC leaders command paramilitary operations in the central-east and control Iran's economic climate.
A conservative regime in Tehran, with theocrats and elected officials on the same page, likely makes nuclear negotiations less difficult – especially if a revised agreement is signed under Rouhani and the advantages gained under Raisi are leveraged. But Iran needs money, and the US and its allies will now not enforce all sanctions except for adjustments made by Tehran in its behavior toward neighboring Arab countries.
The checklist further suggests that Iranian society—young, urban, and so on—will increasingly oppose the ayatollahs unless someone opens up a new horizon of hope. This profoundly inadequate election no longer resolves the political landscape.
