Iranian voters expressed dissatisfaction with Iran’s clerical rule in a presidential election on Friday, with record-low turnout to help two establishment candidates advance to a runoff.
The July 5 runoff will offer voters a final choice between reformist former health minister Dr. Massoud Pezeshkian and ultraconservative former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, neither of whom received more than 50 percent of the vote needed to win the presidency. That will delay for another week the question of who will lead Iran through challenges that include a weak economy, a chasm between rulers and the ruled and a neighboring war that threatens to drag Iran further into trouble.
However, despite their different camps, neither is expected to bring about significant changes in Iran as they must receive final approval from Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to govern.
Here are the most important takeaways from Friday’s election.
Iranians continue to reject this system.
Just 40% of eligible Iranians voted on Friday, according to government data, the lowest turnout in Iran’s presidential race ever — even lower than the 41% in this year’s parliamentary election.
While Iranian elections once drew enthusiastic crowds, in recent years more and more people have chosen to stay home to protest against a ruling regime they accuse of destroying the economy, stifling social and political freedoms and isolating Iran from the world.
In the 2013 presidential election, large numbers of urban middle-class Iranians, hungry for prosperity and a more open society, pinned their hopes on reformist candidate Hassan Rouhani, who they hoped would relax social and political restrictions and reach a deal to lift crippling Western sanctions in exchange for curbs on Iran’s nuclear activities.
Mr. Rouhani brokered the deal, but President Donald J. Trump unilaterally withdrew from it in 2018 and reimposed sanctions, sending Iran’s economy into a state of distress again — an economy that analysts say has also suffered from mismanagement and corruption by Iran’s leaders.
Social freedoms created by the Iranian people during Rouhani’s presidency that were ignored by law enforcers — including a loosening of the dress code that allowed more Iranian women to drop mandatory headscarves to their shoulders — disappeared after the 2021 election of Rouhani’s successor, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardliner who died in a helicopter crash last month.
Iranians believe that voting for reformists will not bring lasting change, so they abandon elections and turn against the current system. Their anger reached a new peak in 2022, when anti-government protests broke out across the country and lasted for months. break out Following a young woman, Mahasa Aminidied after being detained by police. Enforcement of laws requiring modest dress has increased under Lacey, who was detained for improperly wearing a headscarf.
What happens in the runoff?
Voters remain skeptical that any candidate, even one as openly critical of the government as reformist candidate Dr Pezeshkian, can bring about real change, so it is far from clear that many voters will support Dr Pezeshkian in the runoff, despite their disillusionment with the current conservative-led government.
Although Dr. Pezeshkian was the only reformist among the candidates, he made it to the runoff in part because the other two main candidates were hardliners, splitting the conservative vote. Mr. Jalili, who is more ideologically rigid, is unlikely to win the votes of his former conservative opponents, as early polls showed many of them were not interested in supporting him.
However, that may change after his opponent, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, called on his followers on Saturday to vote for Jalili to ensure a victory for the Conservatives.
Overall, the powerful ruling group headed by Khamenei, who has a close personal relationship with Mr. Jalili and shares his hard-line views, appears to prefer Mr. Jalili to win. Mr. Khamenei recently indirectly criticized Dr. Pezeshkian for being too close to the West. The clerical committee charged with vetting presidential candidates allowed five conservatives to run alongside one reformist, suggesting the supreme leader wants a deputy who supports a similar agenda.
does it matter?
Under the Iranian system, the supreme leader makes all the big decisions, especially when it comes to major issues like nuclear negotiations and foreign policy. But the president can set the tone, as Rouhani did in pursuing a nuclear deal with the West.
Whoever becomes president is likely to have freer powers to deal with matters such as social restrictions — not only the enforcement of mandatory headscarves, which has become an ongoing point of contention between Iran’s rulers and citizens, but also sensitive issues such as whether female singers can perform on stage.
He will also have an impact on Iran’s economic policy. In recent years, Iran’s inflation rate has soared and the value of its currency has plummeted. Iranians have struggled to make ends meet, their salaries and savings have shrunk, and many people cannot afford fresh fruit, vegetables and meat.
But efforts to revive the economy may have limited success while Iran continues to suffer from U.S. and European sanctions, which limit its vital oil sales and banking transactions.
What does this mean for the Middle East crisis and Iran’s nuclear program?
All eyes outside Iran are on where the country’s foreign and nuclear policies go next.
Iran is a key player in the conflict, which constantly threatens to spread from Gaza to the entire Middle East. Iran’s arch-enemy Israel is waging a bloody war in Gaza to eliminate Hamas. Iran not only supports, finances and arms Hamas, but also Hezbollah, a Lebanese Shiite militia on Israel’s northern border, with which Israel has engaged in several deadly attacks in recent months.
While the violence has not yet escalated into war, in part because Iran does not want to be drawn into a wider conflict, Israel has recently struck a sharp tone, warning that it may shift its focus from Gaza to Lebanon.Hostility between Iran and Israel is no longer limited to proxy wars or covert attacks: Both sides have carried out overt, limited attacks on each other’s territory this year.
It is also unclear what the election of a new president means for years of Western efforts to curb Iran’s nuclear program. Six years after Trump withdrew the United States from the original nuclear deal, Iran is now closer than ever to being able to produce multiple nuclear weapons. After decades of insisting that its nuclear program was entirely for peaceful purposes, some of Iran’s top leaders have publicly said that recent missile exchanges with Israel mean Iran should accept building a nuclear bomb.
