Groundhog Day in Iran: Hopes for change will again be dashed in this week's election

Iranians on June 28 will go to the polls to vote for their next president. Many Western observers are hoping for the election of a “reformist.”

Sadly, Iran’s presidential elections have long been a fig-leaf exercise for bolstering the Islamic regime, and this election is no exception. No matter which candidate wins, this year’s ballot will almost certainly yield more of the same brutal domestic repression and international aggression for which the Islamic Republic has become notorious.  

Iran normally holds its presidential elections every four years, but the death of former President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash on May 19 necessitated Friday’s snap election. While the title of “president” might sound impressive to Western ears, the reality is that the president of Iran is a “footman,” as former President Mohammad Khatami once said. True power in Iran is concentrated in the hands of the supreme leader — Ayatollah Khamenei — and his loyalists.

This reality extends even to the selection of political candidates. To appear on the ballot, all potential presidential candidates must first gain preliminary approval from the ayatollah-led Council of Guardians. The council’s secret and arbitrary vetting process weeds out both those considered insufficiently committed to regime ideology and the ayatollah’s political enemies. One such figure is the former speaker of parliament and perennial presidential candidate Ali Larijani, who was disqualified in early June.  

As a result, each Iranian election day brings a “Groundhog Day” of dashed hopes for true change, reform and democracy. As in past elections, all the candidates in this year’s contest march in lockstep with the regime-prescribed principles of the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf is a former mayor of Tehran and has occupied multiple high positions within the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — the security forces which act as the ayatollah’s safety blanket for regime preservation.

Saeed Jalili, who lost a leg in the Iran-Iraq War and later wrote a dissertation titled “The Foundation of Islamic Political Thought in the Quran,” has worked in the Office of the Supreme Leader and other government agencies.

Amir-Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi, who ran for president in 2021, is a former parliamentarian who helped direct the movement of funds to Hezbollah as the head of Iran’s Martyrs and Veterans Affairs Foundation.

Alireza Zakani, another 2021 candidate and former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps official, has led the campaign to force women to wear hijabs in his capacity as the current mayor of Tehran.

Mostafa Pourmohammadi, a cleric, was an Intelligence Ministry official in Evin Prison — the long-time epicenter of the regime’s detention and torture of opponents — and served on a commission that approved the death of thousands of political prisoners in 1988.  

Finally, there is Masoud Pezeshkian, a former health minister and the token “reformist” in the race. Pezeshkian has been on record criticizing hijab enforcement, and has enlisted the support of former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif — the diplomatic point man on the 2015 nuclear deal with the U.S. — as a signal of an outward-facing foreign policy. 

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) epitomized many Western hopes for Pezeshkian when he posted on X on June 16, “Does the potential election of Masoud Pezeshkian in Iran provide a glimmer of hope for reform and a possibility of diplomacy in the region?”

The answer is no. Pezeshkian is still an adherent of the regime. Even in the unlikely instance that the ayatollah would allow him to become president (the regime is infamous for rigging election outcomes), his authority would still be constrained by the supreme leader.  

The regime’s control of the final outcome seems to position Ghalibaf or Jalili as the favorites to win. Both men fit the mold of the late President Raisi, a Khamanei protégé and ideological hardliner who was on the short list to replace him one day as supreme leader.

With Iran roiled by the popular Women, Life, Freedom protests of the past several years, and its people perpetually trapped in economic crisis, the Islamic Republic’s leaders view any so-called reformist or moderate candidate as a threat to regime stability. Accordingly, a hard-line candidate committed to enforcing the anti-America, anti-Israel, anti-imperialist, pro-victimhood agenda which has characterized the regime since 1979 is the only insurance policy it has against another revolution.

This is why Raisi, despite being reviled among the Iranian people for his legacy of human rights abuses, won the 2021 election.  

The geopolitical implications of another ayatollah favorite helming the presidency are clear. Even with Arab monarchies publicly condemning Israel for its retaliatory assault on Hamas since Oct. 7, there is continued momentum for rapprochement between Israel and its neighbors, including Saudi Arabia.

One of the common causes creating closer ties between Israel and certain Gulf States is the need to combat Iran’s regional malign influence. A hard-line Iranian president will keep trying to disrupt this growing regional alignment against the Islamic Republic. Where the chief U.S. national security interest is concerned, a continuation of the Iranian nuclear program — a hard-line imperative — gives Tehran a powerful point of leverage against America.   

No matter who wins, the losers in all this are the Iranian people, some 60 percent of whom are under age 30. The pattern of corrupt elections producing leaders out of sync with their ideals and aspirations has helped discourage Iranians from participating in politics at all.

According to one survey conducted inside Iran, 73 percent of Iranians did not watch the first debate, and 36 percent reported that they have not tracked presidential election news at all. One university student who confronted Pezeshkian to his face insisted that “90 percent of youth are trying to convince others not to vote at all...Whether or not you become the president, for four years or eight years, this country will not be fixed...The young generation in this country say ‘we do not want this regime in its entirety.’”

Sadly, the facts surrounding the upcoming election suggest that the great Iranian people will remain saddled with this Islamist dictatorship for the foreseeable future.  

Nazee Moinian is an adjunct fellow in the Middle East Institute and is currently working on a book on Iranian foreign policy. She holds a Ph.D in Iranian Studies from the University of St. Andrews, Scotland.