On 25 May, state media in Iran published the final roster for the country’s upcoming presidential election, scheduled to take place on 18 June. The Guardian Council, a twelve-member constitutional vetting body overseen by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, disqualified most of the presidential hopefuls who had submitted their candidacy.
After the Council completed their sifting process, only seven names remained. The short list consisted of: Incumbent judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi; secretary of the Expediency Council Mohsen Rezaee; former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili; deputy parliament speaker Amir Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi; former vice president Mohsen Mehralizadeh; central bank governor Abdolnasser Hemmati; and lawmaker Alireza Zakani.
Among the 585 other contestants who were disqualified by the council was supreme leader, adviser, and former parliament speaker Ali Larijani, a known pragmatist, who despite his conservative credentials, has veered more to the centre of the political spectrum in recent years.
The swift disqualification of hundreds of candidates by the Supreme Leader has only reinforced the widespread perception in Iran of the elections being a sham, essentially a top-down predetermined act of political theatre. This was especially highlighted by the fact that Larijani was not permitted to run, as he was essentially the only man with even a small hope of challenging the regime’s preferred candidate Ebrahim Raisi.
Raisi is a long-time regime insider, with deep ties to the highest echelons of Iran’s political and religious leadership. Born in 1959, Raisi was eighteen at the time of the 1979 Revolution. Identified by the new leadership as a true committed revolutionary, Raisi was recruited by representatives of Ayatollah Khamenei and received his first post as a judge at the young age of nineteen. Through the 1980s, he held numerous regional positions within the Central Revolutionary Prosecutor’s Office, eventually achieving the post of the agency’s deputy chief. During this period, Raisi oversaw the punishment of untold numbers of dissidents and other enemies of the Revolution. But Raisi’s most heinous crimes came during the infamous summer of 1988, when members of the Prosecutor’s Office along with other security and intelligence officials orchestrated the mass execution of some 30,000 prisoners across the country. Raisi, at the mere age of 28, personally took part in the “Death Commissions” that sent thousands to their deaths at the direct order of Ayatollah Khamenei. For the past thirty years, Raisi continued his meteoric rise through the regime’s institutions and has been a part of every major aggressive policy adopted by Tehran during that period. This included the New Horizon project to recruit foreigners as members for the regime’s militant Quds Force and other financing schemes to arm and train Iran’s terror proxies including the Lebanese Hezbollah.
Considering his distinguished background, it is hardly surprising that Supreme Leader Khamenei and the rest of Iran’s clerical elite prefer Raisi as the country’s next president.
Contrasting Raisi’s hard-line character, is Larijani, who despite a long career as a staunch conservative, has in recent years moved substantially toward the reformist camp. Already in 2009, at the height of the Green Revolution protest movement, Larijani condemned harsh treatment of demonstrators by police and was a strong advocate of the people’s right to political expression. Several years later, he became an outspoken critic of the president Ahmadinejad, calling his policies in an open letter “unlawful actions.” In 2016, he formally broke away from the conservative camp by declaring himself an independent candidate for that year’s parliamentary elections.
The thinly veiled backing of Raisi by the establishment and Larijani’s recent disqualification highlight the current struggle in Iran for the future of the country’s political identity. With the reformist movement in the country growing more and more influential in recent years, the regime’s old-guard have taken increasingly aggressive steps to ensure their hard-line agenda stays the status quo in the halls of Iranian power.
While Larijani is now out of the race, his influence in the outcome of the presidential elections is far from eliminated. The former parliament speaker has been garnering the support of many reformist groups for over a decade. When he was disqualified, a blatant act of regime favouritism, it very likely united the reformist camp. In the long term this could be a strong enough political force to undermine the goals of the ‘principlists’ backed by Khamenei and company. In fact, many observers have posited that Larijani is happy Raisi is running, as nothing could be more effective in pushing all and any voters with reformist sentiments into becoming supporters. While these voters won’t be able to vote for Larijani, they will be able to boycott Raisi. This, in turn, will significantly increase the chances that Raisi, despite his establishment backing, will be defeated at the June polls.
In an ironic way, Larijani’s elimination from the race could prove the biggest blow to Khamenei’s plan for maintaining hardliner continuity in Iran.
