Former Iranian president and hardliner Ebrahim Raisi died on May 19 when his helicopter crashed into a forest.
When Iran holds its run-off election tomorrow (its non-decisive first round of elections was held on June 28), will a reformist win and chart a new course with the West and nuclear deal negotiations?
Or will another hardliner win who will continue Raisi’s anti-Western stance and full-on embrace of an Eastern axis with Russia and China, including violating nuclear limits regardless of the economic price to his (no women were allowed to run) country?
The reformist, physician and parliamentarian Masoud Pezeshkian garnered the highest number of votes in the first round of voting with 10.4 million.
And yet he is a long shot to win the run-off because of four main factors.
His closest competitor, Saeed Jalili, a current member of the high level Expediency Council which advises Khamenei and a former head of the national security council, came in second with 9.4 million votes.
First, all of the other candidates in the first round of running were hardliners. They siphoned off more than three million votes.
All of them have endorsed Jalili, and if most of those votes are transferred to Jalili, he will win handily.
Second is the low voter turnout.
This presidential election saw under 40% voter turnout.
Not like last time
In contrast, in 2021, when Raisi won the election, he won with 18 million votes in an election that saw around 48% voter turnout.
Going back before Raisi, in 2017 Hassan Rouhani defeated Raisi with over 23 million votes, with Raisi at just under 16 million, and a 70% voter turnout.
What this means is that a high voter turnout would favor reformers/pragmatists over regime candidates, but that the general public, especially those opposed to the regime, are so depressed about their ability to bring real change, that many are not even bothering to vote.
They see low voter turnout as their revenge to embarrass the regime for disqualifying many of their favored candidates (Pezeshkian is seen by many as having been allowed to run as the token reformist because the regime viewed him as a weak, non-charismatic, and easily beatable candidate.)
Correctly, they understand that the true ruler of Iran is Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and with no way to replace him, they see no reason to vote.
This effectively hands the election over to the hardliners.
An uphill battle for moderates
For example, when Raisi won in 2021, his vote total only went up by around two million and still would have been a losing result compared to Rouhani in 2017, but the turnout was so low that it was enough to win.
Likewise, Jalali may be able to win with several million fewer votes even than Raisi won with, though such a vote total would have been only around half of Rouhani’s total in 2017.
Third, Khamenei has directly come out and campaigned hard for Jalili. In a low voter turnout election, his endorsement could be decisive.
Fourth, if the election is remotely close, Iran’s corrupt government could easily meddle with the votes as it did in 2009 to hand electoral victory to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad at the time.
From Khamenei’s tone and his disqualification of 74 out of 80 presidential candidates, including more well-known potential reformist or pragmatist challengers to his hardline trend like: former parliament speaker Ali Larijani, former vice president Es’haq Jahangiri, and former minister Abbas Akhondi, suggest he will do whatever it takes to keep a hardliner in the presidency.
This is both to keep clear control over a hardline approach to nuclear negotiations and Iran’s domestic police state bodies as well as to have tighter control over his potential successor, given that he is 85 and has been sick for years.
What all of this means is that Iran will probably continue its policy of trying to use Chinese and Russian economic support to avoid needing to return to the nuclear limits it signed on to in 2015 with the West.
That would leave the Islamic Republic a mere weeks or months away from being able to weaponize its enriched uranium, enough for a potential half dozen or dozen nuclear weapons, once it would decide to complete certain other weaponization issues like detonation.
Jalili makes symbolic statements about a willingness to negotiate over the nuclear issue like Raisi did, but he was once previously a nuclear negotiator in an era when no deal could be reached, and US negotiators viewed him as a major impediment to agreeing on anything.
There is an outside shot that Iran tries to reach a deal with the Biden administration to try to hamstring a potential incoming new Trump administration. But it is more likely that Khamenei has decided to sit on the fence until after US elections to decide what policy he will try in 2025.
Of course, there is an even longer outside chance that reformist or pragmatist-style voters will note that Pezeshkian led the first round of voting and will explode to a much larger volume of voting in the second round to give him a large enough victory that it would not be able to be covered-up.
In that case, there would be renewed hope that as part of a nuclear deal, Tehran might return to the 2015 nuclear limits and restore full IAEA surveillance of its nuclear program.
But even in that case, the nuclear deal’s limits on centrifuges and the ability to snapback global sanctions against Iran expire between October 2025-January 2026.
This means that any diplomatic “win” would need to not only get Iran “back in the box” from the 2015 deal, but extend that deal into the future.
In the absence of such an extension, the only deterrent to the Islamic Republic crossing the nuclear threshold would be an Israeli air force strike or a renewed intense Mossad covert sabotage campaign.