‘Moderate’ Defeats ‘Hardliner’ in Sham Iranian Presidential Election

Reformist Masoud Pezeshkian defeated Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s protege Saeed Jalili Friday to become Iran’s next president, winning the runoff election by 16.3 million votes to Jalili’s 13.5 million.

Pezeshkian was the leading candidate in the first round of Iran’s sham election on June 28, but he did not clear the 50-percent threshold necessary to win outright. He advanced to Friday’s runoff vote along with hardliner Jalili, leaving onetime favorite Mohammed Bagher Qalibaf behind.

Turnout for the first round hit a record low of 39 percent, as many Iranians have grown disgusted with the regime’s farcical elections and preferred to show their contempt by boycotting the vote.

Many opposition leaders and human rights activists urged the boycott as a means of embarrassing the theocratic regime and depriving it of legitimacy. The opposition also pointed out that even if a “moderate” like Pezeshkian were to win, he would not be able to reform the system very much, since absolute power – and control over most of Iran’s wealth – remains in the hands of the Ayatollah and his senior clerics.

Turnout for yesterday’s runoff vote was much higher, rising to 49.8 percent as voters saw Pezeshkian’s chances of defeating the hardliner Jalili improving.

Pezeshkian immediately swore fealty to Ayatollah Khamenei upon securing his victory and spoke of making only modest reforms, such as less brutal treatment for demonstrators, fewer restrictions on Internet access for the Iranian people, and cultivating a better relationship with the international community – except for Israel, which he specifically said he was not interested in building “friendly relations” with.

During one of the last presidential debates, Pezeshkian indicated some sympathy for the “Women, Life, Freedom” protesters and signaled his opposition to the strict headcovering laws that prompted Iran’s “morality police” to kill a young Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini in 2022, triggering the largest protests Iran has seen since the Islamist takeover in 1979.

“We are losing our backing in the society, because of our behavior, high prices, our treatment of girls and because we censor the internet. People are discontent with us because of our behavior,” he said.

Pezeshkian’s campaign slogan, “For Iran,” seemingly alluded to a popular song by an Iranian artist named Shervin Hajipour, who was jailed for three years because he supported the Amini uprising.

The Tehran Stock Exchange (TSE) mustered some applause for Pezeshkian’s victory by rising 3.28 percent after years of declines. None of the Iranian presidential candidates laid out a clear economic agenda during their brief campaigns, but the market seemingly hopes Pezeshkian might make some progress toward easing international sanctions against Iran.

Pezeshkian might even have won by more than the official tally suggested. The UK Guardian noted that Qualibaf’s supporters seemed generally disinclined to throw their votes behind Jalili due to “sharp ideological differences,” which prevented the usual consolidation of hardliner votes from taking place.

Meanwhile, former foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif – Pezeshkian’s most influential supporter, and a prospective leader in his new administration – urged moderate voters to get into the game and put the reformist candidate over the top.

“Those who did not participate in the first round, you sent your message in the first period, now you must complete your message with your presence,” Zarif said. 

Reformists spread rumors of the regime frantically stuffing the ballot box in the final hours of Friday’s voting and paying clerics to herd rural voters to the polls. The final turnout figures were suspiciously high given that social media on Friday was filled with photos and video of empty polling stations.

Whatever tricks the regime might have pulled at the last minute, they were not enough to erase Pezeshkian’s lead. Rumors of his victory brought cheering supporters into the streets at three in the morning while the ballots were still being counted:

Khamenei congratulated Pezeshkian for his victory on Saturday morning and praised the increased turnout as a repudiation of the ballot boycott campaign, which he said was “orchestrated by the enemies of the Iranian nation to induce despair and a feeling of hopelessness.”

“I would like to recommend Dr. Pezeshkian, the elected president, put his trust in Allah, the Compassionate, and set his vision on high, bright horizons,” the ayatollah said. Pezeshkian was a cardiac surgeon before he went into politics.

Pezeshkian succeeded President Ebrahim Raisi, who came to power in 2021 in an even more heavily rigged election that barred all reform-minded candidates from running at all. Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash in May.