Moderate Cleric Wins Iran Presidency

Is Iran about to become more moderate? Reformist-backed candidate Hasan Rowhani won the country's presidential race Saturday with more than 18 million—a little over half—of the votes cast. (His closest competitor, the mayor of Tehran, only garnered 6 million.) Seventy-two percent of Iran's 50 million eligible voters turned out. Although the president of Iran has some power over the economy and the ability to set the tone on major issues, it's the country's supreme leader who makes all final decisions, both religious and civic. The election of a moderate as president, however, puts pressure on his superior to allow some changes to Iran’s political culture.

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June 14, 2013 12:33 PM

 

 

The powerful showing by the former nuclear negotiator allowed him to avoid a two-person runoff and demonstrated the strength of opposition sentiment even in a system that is gamed against it. The ruling clerics barred from the race reform candidates seen as too prominent, allowing a list of hopefuls who were mainly staunch loyalists of the supreme leader.
But the opposition settled on Rowhani as the least objectionable of the bunch, making him the de facto reform candidate.
While Iran's presidential elections offer a window into the political pecking orders and security grip inside the country – particularly since the chaos from a disputed outcome in 2009 – they lack the drama of truly high stakes as the country's ruling clerics and their military guardians remain the ultimate powers.

The hard-line conservatives aligned with the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, placed at the back of the pack of six candidates, indicating that Iranians were looking for their next president to change the tone, if not the direction of the nation, by choosing a cleric who served as the lead nuclear negotiator under an earlier reformist president, Mohammad Khatami.

During the Khatami era, Iran froze its nuclear program, eased social restrictions and promoted dialogue with the West. Friday’s election, which electrified a nation that had lost faith in its electoral process, also served the supreme leader’s goals: restoring at least a patina of legitimacy to the theocratic state, providing a safety valve for a public distressed by years of economic malaise and isolation, and returning a cleric to the presidency. Mr. Ahmadinejad was the first noncleric to hold the presidency, and he often clashed with the religious order and its traditionalist allies.

Mr. Rowhani has been a strong supporter of the disputed nuclear program. And while he is expected to tone down the tough language with the West, he also once boasted that during the period that Iran suspended uranium enrichment, it had made its greatest nuclear advances because the pressure was off.