“THE HEART of elections is competition—if you take that away it becomes a corpse,” said Hassan Rouhani, the president of Iran, last month. To many Iranian voters, though, the presidential election on June 18th was more like a joke. In the days before the vote, some posted images on social media of Ebrahim Raisi, the front-runner, debating not other candidates, but himself. Others shared a clip from “The Dictator”, a film in which Sacha Baron Cohen plays a Middle Eastern despot. Mr Cohen’s character wins a foot race—after shooting the other runners with the starting pistol.
The election, in other words, was not competitive—even by the standards of Iran, where unelected clerics hold the real power. Of the nearly 600 candidates who registered to run, all but seven were disqualified by the Guardian Council, including a former president, a current vice-president and Iran’s longest-serving speaker of parliament. (Three of the seven dropped out later.) The council, a group of clerics and lawyers who vet candidates, essentially cleared the field for Mr Raisi, a hardline cleric and judiciary chief with close ties to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
On June 19th, as the votes were still being counted, Mr Raisi’s closest rivals conceded to him. Turnout appeared to be low, as many liberal and moderate Iranians sat out the election.
Mr Raisi appealed to conservative voters and those who believe his promises to stamp out corruption, which is rife. Like Mr Khamenei, he is opposed to deeper engagement with the West and thinks personal freedoms should extend only as far as Islamic law allows (not very far, in his mind). America placed sanctions on him two years ago for his involvement in the regime’s repression of the pro-democracy Green Movement in 2009, after another rigged election. (Ironically, the man declared the winner of that vote, the then incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was disqualified this time around.) America also cited Mr Raisi’s participation, while deputy prosecutor-general of Tehran, in a “death commission” that ordered the extrajudicial executions of thousands of political prisoners in 1988.
How Mr Raisi is viewed in America matters. Iran has been hit hard by covid-19. Its economy has suffered as a result of the virus, but also because of graft, mismanagement and, most of all, sanctions reimposed by Donald Trump after he yanked America out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. That is the unwieldy name given to the multinational deal under which Iran agreed to curb its nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief. In response to Mr Trump’s actions, Iran has breached the agreement in several ways, not least by enriching uranium to levels far beyond those needed for civilian use. But talks in Vienna, aimed at bringing both parties back to the deal, are said to be making progress.
President Joe Biden has made clear that he wants to re-enter the deal. But some in America fear that the election of Mr Raisi will toss a spanner in the works. The Iranian president’s advisers might include ideologues who make the negotiations more difficult. Still, Mr Khamenei has supported the talks in Vienna. And in the final presidential debate, Mr Raisi himself said he was open to bringing Iran back to the agreement (as long as Iran’s interests are met). An optimistic version of his presidency would see Iran reaping the economic benefits of a renewed deal, while the (so far slow) rollout of covid-19 vaccines leads to a recovery from the pandemic.
But the election of Mr Raisi may also be a harbinger of illiberal changes to Iran’s hybrid political system. Even though the clerics are in charge, the government has long pointed to elections and high turnout to bolster its claim to legitimacy. The democratic façade had already been crumbling. Reformists and moderates led by Mr Rouhani made little progress during his two terms as president (the maximum allowed under the constitution), as the clergy and allied security forces tightened their grip. Before last year’s parliamentary election reform-minded candidates were disqualified en masse. In a recording leaked earlier this year, Muhammad Javad Zarif, the foreign minister under Mr Rouhani, described how he was often sidelined by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), one of the country’s most powerful institutions.
To hold such a blatantly rigged presidential election, all but acknowledging that the system's republican features are a sham, is another step in the hardliners’ consolidation of power. There is much speculation about what comes next. Some expect a further purge of liberals from state institutions. Others think structural changes are coming, as Mr Khamenei, who is 82, prepares the country for his eventual successor. Ali Vaez of the International Crisis Group, a think-tank, believes Mr Khamenei may try to convert the country’s presidential system into a parliamentary one or replace the role of supreme leader with a council. “A parliamentary system would limit the conflicts between the offices of the supreme leader and the president,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs, “and abolishing the position of supreme leader would help his son [Mojtaba] maintain backroom influence after Khamenei’s death.”
The machinations of Mr Khamenei’s narrow group of clerical advisers are murky and unpredictable. Some believe he is grooming Mr Raisi as his successor, but there are plenty of other candidates (including Mojtaba). What is clear is that Iran’s unelected theocrats and the IRGC are tired of being challenged by the reformists, moderates and pragmatists often chosen by voters to represent them. And the regime will undoubtedly remain hostile to Western influence, even if the nuclear deal is renewed. Mr Raisi’s victory bodes ill for any hope of liberalisation in Iran. The Islamic republic looks ever more like an Islamic autocracy, ruled by God’s law, the clergy and the IRGC.