Why Iran’s Upcoming Presidential Elections Matter

By Abolghasem Bayyenat | –

( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – Iran is set to hold extraordinary presidential elections in about two weeks following the death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in northwestern Iran last month. Out of a list of 80 presidential nominees, the Council of Guardians, which is in charge of vetting presidential and parliamentary nominees, has approved the credentials of six, mostly conservative, candidates. The Council has barred several prominent political figures—former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former parliament speaker Ali Larijani, and former reformist vice-president Eshaq Jahangiri—from the race. Despite disqualifying many serious presidential hopefuls, the Council of Guardians’ electoral engineering has not rendered Iran’s presidential election entirely meaningless. Although a far cry from a level playing field, the ballot allows for some level of political competition, so that many Iranian voters can find their next-to-favorite candidates in the race.

Three of the existing six candidates on the ballot can be considered serious contestants or frontrunners, representing different segments of Iran’s political landscape. The current parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf is a pragmatic conservative politician with decades of mostly executive political career, such as a Revolutionary Guards commander, police chief, Tehran’s mayor, and parliamentary speaker, under his belt. Saeed Jalili is a former chief nuclear negotiator under Ahmadinejad and a current appointed member of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, who can be identified as an ideological conservative politician. Being a relatively new public political figure, Jalili lacks Ghalibaf’s executive political credentials but curries favor with puritan revolutionary fringes of Iran’s conservative political camp. Finally, Masood Pezeshkian is a long-time reformist member of the Iranian parliament and a former health minister under reformist president Mohammad Khatami. Being a low-profile and non-charismatic reformist politician, Pezeshkian faces an uphill battle to mobilize his reformist bases in the upcoming election.

Given that none of the presidential candidates enjoys overwhelming public support, the election is likely to lead to a runoff between two of the three frontrunners. Ghalibaf appears to wield an edge over his other two main competitors as he enjoys backing among mainstream conservative political groups and non-ideological grassroots as his recent election as parliament speaker also testifies. Jalili, by contrast, represents a fringe segment of the conservative political camp and appears too revolutionary for traditional conservatives’ political taste.

In the absence of any broad-based mobilization of reformist and secular bases of the Iranian electorate, Pezeshkian is also unlikely to mount an effective challenge to Ghalibaf’s electoral ambitions. Although many reformist political groups and politicians, including former reformist president Mohammad Khatami, have declared their support for Pezeshkian in recent days, given the disillusionment of many reformist and secular voters with Iran’s political and electoral systems in recent years, they will not likely turn out in high numbers at the polls. The barring of key reformist and centrist politicians from the race by the Council of Guardians has further alienated many citizens from the upcoming elections. Pezeshkian’s ethnic Azeri affiliation is also not expected to translate into any significant voter mobilization since ideological and political divisions are far more salient than ethnic cleavages in Iranian national elections. This is mainly due to the fact that, as in most other Iranian provinces, ethnic and political cleavages do not reinforce each other in Azeri-speaking provinces, a fact that diminishes the political salience of ethnicity in Iranian national elections in those areas.

Al Jazeera English Video: “Iran presidential candidates discuss economy in first of five televised debates”

Although Ghalibaf enjoys better odds of winning Iran’s upcoming presidential race in a possible runoff, the election outcome is in no way predetermined, and there are real chances of electoral surprises down the road, given the changing momentum of electoral campaigns as Iran’s past elections have proven. Apart from which candidate is more likely to win the upcoming election, a more important question may be what implication the electoral victory of each of the three frontrunners entails for Iran’s foreign policy, especially its position on its contested nuclear program.

In the absence of other favorable conditions, a change in Iran’s executive chief alone does not bring drastic reorientation in Iranian foreign policy. Given the fragmentation of Iran’s political system, diffusion of political power among various power centers, the balancing role and special authority of Iran’s supreme leader, and the need for consensus-building among key national political authorities on pivotal foreign policy issues, continuity rather than revolutionary change is more the norm within Iran’s political system.

However, when other favorable conditions are present, a change in executive leadership can be a catalyst for major foreign policy change in Iran, as the electoral victory of Hassan Rouhani in 2013 and the successful conclusion of Iran’s nuclear talks with the West in 2015 suggest. As a moderate and pragmatic politician who enjoyed the political support of reformist and centrist political groups and figures, Rouhani ran on an electoral platform of settling the international dispute over Iran’s nuclear program and securing the removal of economic sanctions on the country. As such, the foreign policy preferences of an Iranian president and his supporting coalition can make all the difference when it comes to assessing the implications of a change in executive leadership for Iranian foreign policy. Among the current frontrunners, Saeed Jalili is considered least amenable to a compromise on Iran’s core foreign policy interests. This can be inferred not only from his foreign policy views and national identity conceptions but also his stewardship of Iran’s nuclear talks from 2007 to 2013.

As a reformist candidate, Pezeshkian is in principle most open to compromise on Iran’s foreign policy disputes. Much like other Iranian moderate and reformist politicians, he is expected to advocate a more prudent and less confrontational foreign policy in tune with reformist politicians’ balanced conception of the ideological, economic, and national security interests of the state.

Since he is a pragmatic conservative politician, Ghalibaf’s foreign policy preferences fall between the two extremes of ideological conservatives and moderate reformists. He does not advocate the strategic reorientation of Iranian foreign policy as a reformist politician might do. But he would also not be as uncompromising and inflexible as an ideological and revolutionary conservative politician. On a personality level, throughout his political career Ghalibaf has presented himself as more of a realistic problem-solver than a political ideologue. Given his personality and political worldview as a pragmatic conservative politician, Ghalibaf is expected to be open to tactical leniency on specific foreign policy issues without challenging the strategic orientation of Iranian foreign policy at large. These foreign policy orientations are more in harmony with the preferences of Iran’s supreme leader and the national security establishment than those of a reformist and an ideological conservative president as the history of Iran’s foreign policy making over the past several decades has demonstrated.

Overall, given that other necessary conditions for a major foreign policy shift are currently not present, whichever of the three frontrunner presidential candidates wins Iran’s upcoming election, Iranian foreign policy will remain roughly the same in the foreseeable future, though perhaps with some tactical leniency and stylistic changes. Foreign Policy in Focus

Abolghasem Bayyenat is currently a Farzaneh family postdoctoral fellow in Iranian studies at the University of Oklahoma. Previously, he was a postdoctoral fellow in nuclear security at Harvard University. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the dynamics of Iran’s nuclear policymaking at Syracuse University.