A More Normal Iran?

In 2021, Iran’s hard-line elites were triumphant. Their chosen candidate, Ebrahim Raisi, had won the country’s carefully staged election with more than 70 percent of the vote. Conservatives were in control of the Iranian parliament, and they had the full attention of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Their goal—controlling all the country’s levers of power in order to make Islamist revolutionary fervor its perpetual mainstay—was within reach.

But by the end of the following year, it was clear their agenda was in trouble. The economy was in free fall, and the hard-liners were failing at the basic tasks of governance. The domain in which they appeared most effective—enforcing mandatory veiling for women—was making the state deeply unpopular. When a young woman named Mahsa Amini died at the hands of the morality police in September 2022, after being arrested for not wearing her hijab properly, Iran was racked with protests. Iranian women made it clear they were tired of the state’s dress code and legal control over their bodies. Staggering inflation and shrinking economic opportunities further infuriated Iranians, young and old. The hard-liners seemed to have transformed nagging dissent into open revolt. And so in May, after Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash, Khamenei saw a chance to correct course. Unlike in 2021, Khamenei allowed a reformist, the parliamentarian Masoud Pezeshkian, to run for president. Khamenei knew that if reformists were excluded, voter turnout would be anemic, leading to another spate of unified hard-line control that would erode the legitimacy of the Islamic Republic. Pezeshkian then managed to secure a comfortable, if not overwhelming, victory.

Despite the failures of the Raisi years, this win came as a surprise. Most analysts expected that the supreme leader and his allies would maneuver to ensure that a conservative won office. Still, to many observers, Pezeshkian’s victory is of little consequence. Pezeshkian, they maintain, will not get far in advancing the cause of reform because he will be too weak and too constrained by the supreme leader. The U.S. State Department, for example, dismissed his victory as inconsequential. Nothing had changed, the department declared, because the elections had not been free and fair and because “a significant number of Iranians chose not to participate at all.”

In a sense, this conclusion rings true. Many candidates were barred from running. Khamenei has the final say in most of Iran’s domestic and international policies, and he appears largely committed to conservative ideals. Furthermore, the hard-liners still retain significant power in parliament, the media, and various state institutions—power they will use to resist fundamental change. Finally, the incoming president appears uninterested in radical transformation. Unlike previous reformist leaders, he has pledged fealty to Khamenei and his agenda. Without the supreme leader, Pezeshkian said, “I do not imagine my name would have easily come out of these [ballot] boxes.”

And yet future historians may still mark the 2024 election as the moment when the Islamic Republic decisively shifted—not because Pezeshkian pursued sweeping reforms but because he managed to forge a more moderate Islamist regime. By moving away from both radical reform and revolutionary idealism, Pezeshkian has shown that there is space in Iran for a governing coalition made up of moderate reformists and moderate conservatives (as opposed to hard-line conservatives), one that is anchored in pragmatic governance. In his campaign, Pezeshkian focused on small social and economic reforms designed to improve the daily lives of people—most of which are achievable. His drive for renewed diplomacy with the United States will be harder to push through, but he can persuade Khamenei to support talks and perhaps even approve a modest nuclear agreement. He could, in other words, move Iran beyond the ideological battles that have defined its post-revolutionary history.

COMPROMISE CANDIDATE

Today, Iran stands at the zenith of its international influence. The country and its network of allied militias are commanding newfound fear and respect in the Middle East. Tehran’s intense opposition to Israel is winning it political support across the region. The government’s nuclear program is at its most expansive point yet, and the state is building alliances with China and Russia to counteract the West.

These successes, however, contrast sharply with the despair felt by many Iranians. The country’s economy is flailing, plagued by U.S. sanctions, gross mismanagement, growing corruption, and inequality. The population is increasingly fed up with conservative, clerical leadership. Such discontent explains why Amini’s death prompted mass protests and why the demonstrations proved hard to subdue. People marched across the country for months on end until finally, through unremitting violence, Tehran put a stop to the uprising. Even so, people continue to rebel in smaller ways. So many women are flouting the country’s hijab requirement, for example, that the state has found the rule almost impossible to enforce.

For Khamenei—and many in his inner circle—the protests served as a wake-up call. They illustrated that the hard-liners had failed and that their leadership was unpopular and deeply destabilizing. Allowing Pezeshkian to run, Khamenei apparently hoped, might help give the Islamic Republic a new lease on life by demonstrating a degree of openness without posing much of a threat to the ruling order. After all, few expected him to win. At the time, Pezeshkian was a relatively obscure member of parliament, even within the already somewhat marginal reformist constituency. Iran’s moderate bloc featured other, more popular candidates who wanted to run for president. But they were all disqualified by the Guardian Council, the group appointed by the supreme leader that vets candidates.

Pezeshkian proved to be the rare candidate who could unite Iranians.

Yet once the campaign began, Pezeshkian found ways to make his case to the people. He has a compelling life story that became integral to his campaign: he is a heart surgeon who never remarried after his wife died in a car crash and who raised his children alone. Pezeshkian formerly served as a university president and as minister of health before becoming a member of parliament. Yet unlike some other long-standing officials, he has a reputation for being competent, pious, and graft free. Part Kurdish and part Azeri, Pezeshkian was able to help bridge the ethnic fissures that afflict Iranian society, promising to address minority groups’ long-standing grievances. (During the 2022 protests, the Iranian provinces of Baluchistan and Kurdistan were epicenters of dissent and the scenes of some of the bloodiest crackdowns.)

Critically, Pezeshkian proved to be the rare candidate who could unite Iranians with different ideological beliefs. The titular leader of the reformists, Azar Mansoori—a veteran dissident and the first woman to serve as the director of a national political organization—had successfully led campaigns to boycott the 2021 presidential election and the 2023 parliamentary elections and had threatened to boycott this contest, as well. But she encouraged people to vote for Pezeshkian. At the same time, Pezeshkian gained traction among some conservatives by pledging allegiance to Khamenei and promising not to try to change the Islamic Republic’s fundamental identity. Instead, he said, his goal was simply to make the daily lives of Iranians better by reducing inflation, improving governance, easing Internet access, and no longer enforcing rigid strictures on women’s dress. He made a point of casting pragmatism as both a religious virtue and a political necessity.

Pezeshkian, of course, still trailed among conservatives in the contest. But he benefited from a rift between the pragmatic, moderate conservatives and the dogmatic hard-liners who had formed the Raisi government. During the election’s first round, moderate conservatives supported the candidacy of Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament and a former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander. A small number also backed the cleric Mostafa Pourmohammadi. The hard-liners, meanwhile, rallied to Saeed Jalili, the former secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council. During the first round, the clashes between the moderate conservatives and Jalili’s hard-liners were often caustic and personal. Jalili dismissed Ghalibaf as an unserious “construction contractor” (a reference to Ghalibaf’s tenure as mayor of Tehran and many involvements in construction schemes). Pourmohammadi launched stinging and damaging attacks on Jalili, arguing that his policies cost Iran billions of dollars in damages and new sanctions.

Khamenei and his IRGC allies likely wanted Ghalibaf to be president. IRGC media outlets were replete with articles playing up Ghalibaf and criticizing Jalili. They circulated photos of Ghalibaf alongside senior IRGC commanders and spoke of his close friendship with IRGC General Qasem Soleimani, who was killed in a U.S. strike in 2020 and remains a hero among conservatives. But in the first round, Ghalibaf was eliminated, as was Pourmohammadi. Instead, Jalili, relying on the hard-liner’s political machine, advanced to a head-to-head matchup with Pezeshkian. In response, many senior conservative stalwarts and former IRGC commanders openly threw their weight behind Pezeshkian’s candidacy. Iranians concluded that this public, conservative defection would not have happened without the supreme leader’s quiet assent. As a result, a sizable chunk of Ghalibaf’s and Pourmohammadi’s voters—among them Ghalibaf’s campaign manager—swung toward Pezeshkian. On July 5, he won the presidency.

REALM OF THE POSSIBLE

Pezeshkian’s victory was no romp. He defeated Jalili by ten percentage points and with record-low turnout. The low turnout was thanks in large part to disaffected Iranian women, many of whom called for election boycotts. During the first round of the election, barely 40 percent of eligible voters cast ballots. In the runoffs, just over 50 percent did.

But a win is a win, and Pezeshkian may not need a large popular mandate to advance his agenda. Since his election, he has made clear that his priorities are good governance and bridge building, neither of which requires transformative political reforms. In an effort to create greater transparency than previous administrations, for example, Pezeshkian’s transition team has established committees charged with selecting ministers based on management expertise and experience rather than loyalty. Pezeshkian’s team also appears to have prioritized increasing diversity in government. According to media reports, the incoming president has set selection criteria stipulating that 20 percent of cabinet members should be women, 60 percent should be under the age of 50, and 60 percent should not have previously served as ministers. (Although, in the name of experience, he will appoint former government officials below the rank of ministers.) Finally, Pezeshkian wants his government to feature both reformists and conservatives. Fulfilling this last promise may prove to be difficult. But the fact that he is making the effort to do so is a break from Iran’s fractious politics.

Once his government is in place, Pezeshkian will be under immediate pressure to improve the economy. To do so, he has promised to change practices that have produced budget deficits, financial irregularities, economic scarcities, and aggravated shortages of water and arable land, such as subsidies that flow to certain vested interests. To this end, he has also pledged to tackle powerful networks of institutionalized corruption—which will test his mettle as a leader.

Still, domestic reforms will get Iran’s economy only so far. The country is also in dire need of investment, which is not possible unless the West relaxes its sanctions. To that end, Pezeshkian has strongly advocated for serious diplomatic engagement with the United States, arguing that a rapprochement is necessary to improve Iran’s economy.

Change, even if not radical, can still be consequential.

Changing Iran’s foreign policy will be harder for Pezeshkian given that international relations are largely the domain of the supreme leader and the IRGC. Pezeshkian will certainly not be able to untangle the Gordian knot that is Iran’s nuclear policies, regional activities, and ties to China and Russia. But that does not mean that he cannot have any impact on foreign policy, especially when it comes to nuclear diplomacy. Although Khamenei has greenlighted expanding Iran’s nuclear program, he is not averse to negotiations over its scope, provided they reduce sanctions pressure on Iran. A deal that would end Iran’s nuclear program may not be in the cards, but a pragmatic agreement that would trade verifiable restrictions on the program in exchange for meaningful sanctions relief is very much imaginable. Khamenei, after all, supported Raisi’s attempt at diplomacy during the Vienna talks and then forged a secret de-escalation agreement with U.S. officials in 2023. And Iran’s incoming president should have even more room to maneuver. Khamenei allowed him to run knowing what his stance on negotiations is, and his election has shown the country’s higher authorities that a wide spectrum of Iranians, including moderate conservatives, want Tehran to change course. The outcome of Pezeshkian’s possible pivot will also depend, of course, on whether the United States will agree to engage with the incoming president. It should, in part to test how much leeway Pezeshkian has and in part to see how far a nuclear agreement could go.

U.S. officials may find that Pezeshkian has more freedom than they think. By all accounts, Iran’s incoming president has Khamenei’s backing. After the election, the two men met at length and walked together in full view of cameras to a conservative religious gathering—an unusual occurrence. Khamenei has also commanded parliament to quickly approve Pezeshkian’s cabinet and to cooperate with the new government in reducing the pressure of sanctions on Iran.

Khamenei’s support, of course, also serves as a reminder that Pezeshkian is a creature of the Islamic Republic. He will not cross the supreme leader, and his stated goal is to craft a stable political center. It is therefore understandable why a large number of Iranians remain skeptical of Pezeshkian and his agenda. But change, even if not radical, can still be consequential. It could make the country more functional, more prosperous, and more peaceful—a fact that many veteran activists know well. “After the various crackdowns of the past few years in the face of protests and Iran’s growing strength in the region, we do not expect the Islamic Republic to go anywhere,” one longtime civil society organizer told us. “But we want to change the few things we can that will make our lives easier and give us room to breathe.”