Iranians in Iran and around the world will go to voting booths today (28 June) to elect a new president. In fact, as I write these lines, the voting has already started with the opening of voting booths in New Zealand for the Iranians residing there. This extraordinary election came about after a shocking event last month: President Ebrahim Raisi's death in a helicopter crash. But what followed was even more unexpected than the crash. Unlike what many expected, the 2024 presidential elections were not an uncompetitive coronation, as was Raisi’s win in 2021.
These elections are nothing approaching free and fair, of course, and all candidates declare their complete loyalty to the regime's core policies and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Those who were even slightly critical, like former reformist MP Mahmoud Sadeghi, were not allowed to run by the Guardian Council, the body that vets all candidates and whose members owe their appointments to Khamenei.
Even so, the running candidates represent various regime factions and have engaged in a ferocious struggle with one another. Of the six candidates who had been initially approved to run, four still remain in the competition.
Three frontrunners
Three have a realistic chance of winning: Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the conservative speaker of parliament and former mayor of Tehran who has emphasised his technocratic credentials but is saddled with corruption allegations; Saeed Jalili, a former national security advisor whose harsh fundamentalism scares many away; and Masud Pezeshkian, a reformist who has not run with much of a reform agenda, instead emphasising his loyalty to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and insisting on the need for supra-factional unity.
Pezeshkian enjoys the support of the reformist faction but also that of the centrist former president, Hassan Rouhani, and his star team, such as former foreign minister Javad Zarif and former communications minister Javad Azari-Jahromi. Former reformist president Mohammad Khatami and former leader of the 2009 Green movement, Mehdi Karroubi, have also endorsed Pezeshkian.
Two other hardliner conservative candidates, Alireza Zakani and Amir-Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi, have already withdrawn while appealing to Jalili and Ghalibaf to unite and present a single candidacy to defeat Pezeshkian whose government, they warn, will be a “third Rouhani term.”
In the days leading to the elections, many in the conservative camp (or, as they like to put it themselves, “the revolutionary front”) tried to convince either Jalili or Ghalibaf to drop out in favour of each other. Despite both nominally belonging to the same political camp, the two couldn’t be more different.
Ghalibaf is a long-time former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) who commanded a division during the 1980-1988 war with Iraq and was a close comrade of fellow IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani. He continues to enjoy a firm base in the IRGC, whose organs have mostly supported him.
But despite swearing his loyalty to the regime, Ghalibaf is not an ideologue and emphasises performance over revolutionary purity. In the televised debates ahead of the elections, he promised to make a deal with the West to lift the sanctions in exchange for curtailing Iran’s nuclear programme; in other words, quite the same path followed by Rouhani and now promised by Pezeshkian.
In contrast, Jalili is an austere extremist surrounded by many from the outgoing Raisi administration. Instead of promising deals with the West that could bring sanctions relief to Iran, he advocates relying on ties with non-Western countries. One grand idea he repeatedly touted in debates was selling Iranian agricultural products to Russia to make up for Moscow’s loss of products from the European Union.
When he served as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator from 2007 to 2013, he barely negotiated and was a nightmare for his Western interlocutors. As a result, Iran suffered from ever more sanctions. Domestically, Jalili is already promising a harsher agenda of repression. One of his closest advisors said the war on women who are not obeying the regime’s mandatory veiling rules should be pursued “harshly and without exception, like the war on drugs.”
In other words, although they are both nominally conservative or Principlist (Osoolgera) as they are called in the Iranian political parlance, Ghalibaf is in many ways closer to Pezeshkian than to Jalili. The crucial difference is Ghalibaf's strong IRGC base. But, as powerful as the IRGC is, with its control of much of Iran's economic and military power, it hasn’t been able to force Jalili out.
In the last few days, meetings were reportedly held in the holy city of Mashhad in the northeastern province of Khorasan, attended by Ghalibaf, Jalili and Esmail Qaani—Soleimani’s successor as head of the Quds Force, the external operations wing of the IRGC which commands its support to groups such as Hamas and Hezbollah. All three men hail from Khorasan, and there was hope that Qaani’s prestige could convince Jalili to resign. But he failed, and Jalili remains on the ballot.
Contending with voter apathy
This is good news for the reformist Pezeshkian, who would have a much tougher time if one of these two major rivals resigned. Pezeshkian main remaining rival is public apathy and the fact that most of those who are critical of the status quo, usually the natural base for reformists, are unlikely to show up to vote at all.
The opponents of the regime, including Nobel prize winners Shirin Ebadi and Narges Mohammadi, have boycotted the vote, and so have many others who regard any vote as dishonouring the memory of hundreds of Iranians killed in anti-regime protests of 2017, 2019 and 2022-23.
Still, even if only a small part of his base shows up, Pezeshkian has a very good chance of winning. It is quite likely that no candidate will win a majority on Friday, which means that the elections will go to a second round, which will be held on 5 July.
Pezeshkian will almost definitely make it to the run-off, and he has a good chance of winning against either Jalili or Ghalibaf. This is especially true if, as many polls currently show, Jalili makes it to the second round. Many of those who might stay home in the first round will likely turn out to cast an 'Anybody But Jalili' vote for Pezeshkian.
Time for change?
So, what does this all mean for the future of power and politics in the Islamic Republic? Unlike what many might think, a Pezeshkian victory won't be all bad news for Khamenei. In a certain way, it could even be the best outcome for the Supreme Leader. With Ghalibaf, he would have to contend with a strong president with his own military base.
Jalili's harshness could mean domestic and international headaches for the regime. Instead, by allowing Pezeshkian to run, Khamenei has brought the reformist faction back from the political wilderness. Even if the turnout remains limited, it will likely be higher than in 2021.
A Pezeshkian administration will likely engage in a new round of talks with the West and will also reduce international isolation. Additionally, he will be a weak president with a weak base (since he doesn't have a massive popular base and the reformist faction has been severely weakened in recent years), having to contend with hardliners dominating the parliament and most other intuitions of power.
Still, Pezeshkian would be quite different from the hardliner Raisi, who had little political talent and no independent base of his own and thus turned to an empty suit and a perfect vessel for the whims of Khamenei.
More than anything, these elections might be remembered as a pivotal moment of change: when reformists stopped asking for reforms when conservatives were more divided internally than vis-à-vis their opponents, and when Khamenei proved once more to be a willy and unpredictable power player even at the age of 85. The Islamic Republic is sure changing, even if such change comes in surprising and unexpected ways.
