Iranians will go to the polls on June 28 to choose their next president, with many Western observers hoping to elect a “reformist” president.
Unfortunately, Iran’s presidential elections have long been a sham election aimed at strengthening the Islamic regime, and this year’s election is no exception. No matter which candidate wins, this year’s elections will almost certainly result in more of the brutal domestic repression and international attacks for which the Islamic Republic of Iran is notorious.
Iran typically holds presidential elections every four years, but the sudden elections were necessitated on Friday following the death of former president Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash on May 19. While the title “president” may sound impressive to Western ears, the reality is that the Iranian president is a “servant.” President Mohammed Khatami once said:Real power in Iran is concentrated in the hands of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei and his supporters.
This reality also extends to the selection of political candidates. To appear on the ballot, presidential candidates must first receive preliminary approval from the Guardian Council, headed by the ayatollah. The council’s secret and arbitrary vetting process eliminates both those deemed insufficiently compliant with the regime’s ideology and the ayatollah’s political opponents. One such figure is former speaker of parliament and frequent presidential candidate. Ali Larijani, who was disqualified in early June.
As a result, every election in Iran is a “Groundhog Day” that dashes hopes for real change, reform and democracy. As in past elections, all candidates running in this year’s election are aligned in line with the principles the regime established during the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf is a former mayor of Tehran who held several senior positions within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the security force that serves as a safety blanket for the ayatollahs to maintain the regime.
Said Jalili, who lost a leg in the Iran-Iraq war and later wrote a paper titled “The Foundations of Islamic Political Thought in the Quran,” has served in the supreme leader’s office and other government agencies.
Amir Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi, who ran for president in 2021, is a former member of parliament who oversaw the transfer of funds to Hezbollah as head of the Iranian Martyrs and Veterans Affairs Foundation.
Alireza Zakhani, a 2021 presidential candidate and former Revolutionary Guard officer, is now mayor of Tehran and has led a campaign to force women to wear the hijab..
The cleric, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, was a Ministry of Intelligence officer at Evin Prison, long a centre for the detention and torture of regime opponents, and served on the committee that approved the deaths of thousands of political prisoners in 1988.
Finally, there is Masoud Pezechkian, a former health minister and the iconic “reformist” of the race. Pezechkian is known for his criticism of the compulsory hijab. He had the support of former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif. Trump, who was the diplomatic man behind the 2015 nuclear deal with the United States, sees it as an outward-looking foreign policy signal.
Rep. Ro Khan (D-Calif.) personified Western expectations of Pezechkian. Posted on June 16th in X“Does the possible election of Massoud Pezeshkian in Iran offer a ray of hope for the possibility of reform and diplomacy in the region?”
No. Pezeshkian remains a supporter of the regime, and even in the unlikely event that the ayatollahs were to allow him to become president (the regime is notorious for rigging elections), his power would still be limited by the supreme leader.
The administration’s control over the final outcome means that either Ghalibaf or Jalili are the favorites to win. Both men are Khamenei protégés and ideological hardliners in the mold of the late President Raisi, who was on the shortlist to succeed Khamenei as supreme leader.
In Iran, Women, Life and Liberty Protest Given the Islamic Republic’s recession over the past few years and the people’s constant economic crisis, the Islamic Republic’s leaders see so-called reformist or moderate candidates as a threat to the stability of the regime. Therefore, a hard-line candidate who will pursue the anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-imperialist and victimhood policies that have characterized the regime since 1979 is the only insurance against a new revolution.
This is why Raisi won the 2021 elections despite being condemned by the Iranian people for his history of human rights violations.
The geopolitical implications of another ayatollah’s favorite taking office are clear: Arab countries have openly condemned Israel’s retaliatory attacks on Hamas since October 7, but momentum for reconciliation between Israel and its neighbors, including Saudi Arabia, continues.
One common cause of Israel’s growing ties with some Gulf states is the need to combat Iran’s malign regional influence. Iran’s hardline president will continue to seek to destroy this growing regional coalition against the Islamic Republic. With regard to key U.S. national security interests, the continuation of Iran’s nuclear program (a hardline imperative) will give Tehran powerful leverage over the United States.
No matter who wins, the losers in all this are the Iranian people. Of these, 60% are under 30 years old.A pattern of corrupt elections producing leaders who are inconsistent with their ideals and aspirations has made Iranians hesitant to participate in politics at all.
according to Conduct one survey Inside Iran, 73% of Iranians did not watch the first debate, and 36% said they were not following the presidential election news at all. Faced Pezechkian argued to his face that “90 percent of young people are trying to convince others not to vote…Whether he’s president or not, whether it’s four years or eight years, this country is not going to get better…The younger generation in this country is saying, ‘We don’t want this government at all.'”
Unfortunately, the facts surrounding the upcoming elections suggest that the great Iranian people will remain shackled to this Islamic dictatorship for the foreseeable future.
Najee Moinian is an adjunct fellow at the Middle East Institute and is currently writing a book on Iranian foreign policy. in Iranian Studies from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
