by FLYNT LEVERETT, HILLARY MANN LEVERETT, and SEYED MOHAMMAD MARANDI
Iran’s next President Hassan Rouhani PHOTO/Wikipedia
Four years ago, the U.S. news media pronounced Iran’s elections a fraud despite no hard evidence, and predicted a similar outcome again this year. But the election of Hassan Rouhani is now hailed as a democratic victory, a paradox addressed by Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett and Seyed Mohammad Marandi.
The United States’ perennially mistaken Iran “experts” are already spinning Hassan Rouhani’s victory in Iran’s presidential election as a clear proof of the Islamic Republic’s ongoing implosion. In fact, Rouhani’s success sends a very different message: it is well past time for the U.S. to come to terms with the reality of a stable and politically dynamic Islamic Republic of Iran.
Three days before the election, we warned that U.S. and expatriate Iranian pundits were confidently but wrongly positing how Iran’s election process would “be manipulated to produce a winner chosen by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – a “selection rather than an election” – consolidating Khamenei’s dictatorial hold over Iranian politics.”
Many, like the Brookings Institution’s Suzanne Maloney, identified nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili as Khamenei’s “anointed” candidate; the Washington Post declared that Rouhani “will not be allowed to win.”
By contrast, we held that Iran was “in the final days of a real contest”, during which candidates had “broad and regular access to national media,” had “advertised and held campaign events,” and had “participated in three nationally televised (and widely watched) debates.” The election “will surprise America’s so-called Iran ‘experts’,” we wrote, for the winner will emerge “because he earned the requisite degree of electoral support, not because he was ‘annointed’”.
The real contest
Rouhani’s victory demonstrates that the election was a real contest, and that the perceived quality of candidates’ campaigns mattered greatly in many Iranians’ decisions for whom to vote. In the end, most Iranians seemed to believe – and acted as if they believed – that they had a meaningful choice to make.
Besides the presidential ballot, Iranians voted for more than 200,000 local and municipal council seats – with more than 800,000 candidates standing for those seats – a “detail” never mentioned by those constantly deriding the Islamic Republic’s “dictatorship”.
Certainly, Western “experts” were wrong that former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani’s disqualification had driven Iranians into a state of political alienation and apathy. Rafsanjani is, at this point, not a popular figure for many Iranians; he almost certainly would have lost had he been on this year’s ballot. Rafsanjani’s sidelining was a necessary condition for the rise of Rouhani, a Rafsanjani protégé.
More broadly, Rafsanjani’s dream has been to build a pragmatic center in Iranian politics, eschewing “extremes” of both conservatives – or “principlists,” as they are called in Iran – and reformists. Instead, he has antagonized both camps without creating an enduring constituency committed to a centrist vision.
The election of Rouhani – the only cleric on the ballot, who campaigned against “extremism” in all forms and was endorsed by Rafsanjani – may contribute more to realizing Rafsanjani’s dream than another unsuccessful Rafsanjani presidential bid.
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