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.
By Flynt Leverett, 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 overIranian politics.”
Iran’s President-elect Hassan Rouhani. (Wikimedia Commons)
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.
Going into the campaign, Rouhani’s biggest weakness was foreign policy; in 2003-05, during Rouhani’s tenure as chief nuclear negotiator, Tehran agreed to suspend uranium enrichment for nearly two years, but got nothing from Western powers in return. In fact, criticism of Rouhani’s negotiating approach was an important factor in Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s first election to the presidency in 2005.
During this year’s campaign, Rouhani effectively addressed this potential vulnerability, arguing that his approach allowed Iran to avoid sanctions while laying the ground for the subsequent development in its nuclear infrastructure. Moreover, Rouhani’s campaign video included praise from armed forces chief of staff General Seyed Hassan Firouzabadi, which bolstered Rouhani’s perceived credibility on security issues.
In the week between the third candidates’ debate on foreign policy and election day, polls showed with accumulating clarity that Rouhani was building the strongest momentum of any candidate, along with Tehran Mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf who came in second, and whom we flagged two days before the vote as a likely contender with Rouhani in a second-round runoff.
By election day, polls showed Rouhani pulling ahead of Qalibaf and his other opponents a sharp contrast to Iran’s 2009 presidential election, when no methodologically sound poll ever showed former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi ahead of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Key to Rouhani’s success was his ability to forge coalitions, especially with reformists. Rouhani is not himself a reformist. He belongs to the Society of Combatant Clergy, the conservative antipode to the Assembly of Combatant Clerics founded by Mohammad Khatami who became Iran’s first reformist president in 1997 and other reform-minded clerics.
Overall, Rouhani’s share of the vote was higher in small towns and villages, where people are more conservative, than in larger cities largely because he is a cleric.
The real reformist on this year’s ballot was Mohammad Reza Aref, who served as Khatami’s first vice-president. Aref, however, proved a lackluster candidate and attracted little popular support. Other reformists pressed him to quit after the final candidates’ debate, which freed Khatami to endorse Rouhani. While reformists were not the core of Rouhani’s electoral base, their votes were crucial to getting him over the 50 percent threshold.
Iran’s 2013 presidential election also confirms a point we have been making for four years that, contrary to Western conventional wisdom, no hard evidence has been put forward showing that Iran’s 2009 presidential election, when Ahmadinejad won re-election over Mousavi and two other opponents, was “stolen.”
No Post-Election Gatherings
Even so, Iran’s political system adopted last year a law creating an election commission to oversee and certify the Interior Ministry’s conduct of the 2013 election. This and other systemic responses to potential or real abuse such as the closure of the Kahrizak Detention Centre where cases of police brutality were reported after the 2009 election demonstrate the Islamic Republic’s capacity to reform itself.
Pointing this out in the West prompts slanderous accusations of murderous appeasement but those who make such accusations are consistently proven wrong, as Iranian politics regularly defies their cartoonish and derogatory stereotypes.
The biggest difference from 2009 is the behavior of the candidates themselves. This year, all of the candidates agreed not to hold post-election gatherings or make statements about the outcome until all votes were counted and final results officially announced.
They stuck to this agreement as the Interior Ministry periodically announced partial results coming in from polling stations across Iran. Despite the fact that president-elect Rouhani won by just 261,251 votes over the 50 percent threshold, his rivals immediately issued messages of congratulations, as did Ayatollah Khamenei.
Compare that with 2009, when while polls were still open and no votes had been counted Mousavi declared to have official “information” that he had won “by a substantial margin.” This set the stage for him to claim fraud and call supporters into the streets to protest, giving birth to the Green Movement.
When Mousavi failed to back up his charge of fraud with a shred of hard evidence, the Greens’ popular base shrank dramatically because they were no longer challenging a particular election outcome, but the very idea of the Islamic Republic as a political system.
Notwithstanding the Greens’ failure, the movement has ever since been a primary vessel for the fantasies of Iranian expatriates, pro-Israel advocates and Western interventionists that Western-style secular democracy would replace participatory Islamist governance in Iran.
But reformists and their centrist allies who support the Islamic Republic, even if their visions for its future differ from those of Iranian principlists distanced themselves from the Green Movement. This enabled them to regroup and to learn lessons from the 2009 election, from Rafsanjani’s presidential defeat in 2005, and from Khatami’s setbacks during his presidency that proved crucial to Rouhani’s electoral success this year.
The United States and the West need to get over the pernicious wishful thinking that the Islamic Republic is not an enduring and legitimate system for Iranians living in their country.
And the Islamic Republic’s core features of participatory Islamist governance and foreign policy independence have broad appeal not just in Iran, but for hundreds of millions of Muslims across the Middle East. It’s time for the U.S. to come to terms with that reality.
Flynt Leverett and Hillary Mann Leverett are authors of Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran (New York: Metropolitan, 2013) and teach international relations, he at Penn State, she at American University.
Seyed Mohammad Marandi is professor of North American Studies and dean of the Faculty of World Studies at the University of Tehran. [This analysis originally appeared at AlJazeera.]
Your analysis in this article seems to differ somewhat from that in your book, Going To Tehran. You state on pg. 275, “Some reformists are arguing for another tactical choice in 2013, such as supporting a new-generation conservative sympathetic to at least some parts of the reform agenda:…” You then mention several possibllities but not including Rouhani. You then conclude that, “This prospect, however, is at best a long-term recovery for the reformists – all of which means that the center of the action in Iranian politics will remain on the conservative side of the spectrum for at least the next several years.” (p. 275) This is not a “got-cha” question but the distinct impression your book left on me is that a) the Iranian elections are actual elections and should be respected by the West and b) the reformists in Iran represent largely a minority, middle-class secular movement in a majority conservative, religious state. Hence, your conclusion that a reformist movement was not in the cards for some years to come. So I was surprised by the fact that a ‘centrist'(?) won. Are there other factors about Rouhani’s victory that we should know? What explains his evident popularity after the disaster of the Greens? BTW, I found your book to be an excellent “hard data” analysis of the evolution of Iran and its culture and the ineffectual approach of the West. I hope there are others like you in Washington who can convey the essence of the facts and, most important, are listened to. Thank you.
It is interesting that the US-favoured candidate conveniently won by a small margin, and was accepted at once by the “international community”. A stark contrast to the winner of the recent Venezuelan elections!
Having read your ‘analyses’ of Iran’s internal politics a number of times, I must, again, respectfully disagree with your rather muddled analysis. First of all, the fact that Rafsanjani is disliked needs amplification. He is one of the original stooges of the first iteration of the Islamic Republic — a creation of rightwing Republicans in the US as much as the rightwingers around Khomeini, their clandestine allies. Further, you omit the fact that one source of Rafsanjani’s unpopularity is that he is the richest man in Iran — a billionaire of longstanding, and a nasty, ill-tempered elitist, to boot. He is also quite comfortable playing the clandestine game of secret US friend. This is also Rouhani’s game, and you ought to know this. Rouhani was very suddenly and quickly elevated to leading presidential candidate — in the Western media. Yes, you’re right, Iranians elect a staggeringly large number of local and regional officials in their voting procedures and they are, at that level, NOT a dictatorship. However, the fact of the Supreme Leader’s job-for-life position does not qualify the regime as ‘democratic’!! Your analyses continue to spin what appears to be ‘inside’ analyses, and defense of “Iran” in general, but you are really covering up the fact that Rouhani’s sudden rise to the top — and his role as a stooge of Rafsanjani — is very much in the interests of Washington. You seem to be under the impression that close relations with Washington are “good” for the people of other countries! Why?? Why and when, exactly, does it benefit other people for their governments to be on good terms with the corporate lackeys and war criminals who are now running the United States??? Which side are you on, Leveretts? For whom do you work? Since when is “good relations” with the US a plus for anyone except the most corrupt and power-mad leaders of other countries, people willing to do the bidding of Wall Street and the Pentagon?
What was that number of times you read this piece over in order to perceive the writers’ “impression that close relations with Washington are “good”, etc.”? Your only assertion is that Rouhani is a stooge who will kowtow to the West, and give up Iran’s long-pursued independence of US and European foreign policy. I can’t refute that supposition, but the article was about the elections in Iran being carried out in order and verity, and contrary to the misinformation and propaganda of the US government and corporate media. If you need to get more context for your opinion of the Leveretts, watch their 2-part interview with Gareth Porter on therealnews.com.