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1. Pezekhitsian was successfully elected as the new president of Iran. As the only reformist candidate, he faced a number of hard-line opponents, showed strong campaign strength, and finally came out on top.
2. Pezeshchisyan is an ethnic Azerbaijani born in 1954 who has a modest political career but a wealth of political experience. His campaign platform, which focuses on economic issues and his willingness to improve relations with the West, won the support of some voters.
3. Although the voter turnout in this election has increased compared to the first round, it is still at a low level, reflecting the disappointment of the Iranian people with the current political situation. The election results also revealed disagreements within Iran's conservative faction, with some conservative politicians even supporting Pezeshiziyan across camps, leading to the defeat of the favored hard-line candidate Jalili.
4. With the election of Pezekhizyan, Iran's political landscape may usher in new changes. However, the policy differences between reformers and conservatives have not been eliminated, and the contest will continue. Going forward, the Pezekhitsian government will face a major challenge in promoting domestic reforms, improving economic conditions, and easing international relations without jeopardizing the Islamic Republic's fundamental institutions.
Contributing Author of Phoenix Big Reference | Nie Shuyi, observer on the Middle East
Edit | Qu Gongze, Li Zhupu
On July 6, local time, Mohsen Islami, spokesman for the Iranian Election Commission, announced that in the second round of voting in the presidential election held on July 5, Massoud Pezehizizyan, who represents the moderate reformers, won more than half of the votes and was elected as the new president of Iran.
The reformist "dark horse" had the last laugh
In the July 5 vote, Pezeshiziyan received more than 16.38 million votes, while his rival, hard-line candidate Jalili, received 13.5 million votes, according to official Iranian figures. Pezeshizijan won the presidential runoff by a huge margin.
After the results are confirmed by Iran's Guardian Council of the Constitution and Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Ali Khamenei, Khamenei will present Pezeshiziyan with a certificate of presidency and he will go to parliament to take the oath of office.
According to Iran's constitution, the new president is required to submit a list of new cabinet members to the parliament two weeks after taking office, and the parliament will review and vote on the final formation of the new Iranian government.
▎ Pezeshiziyan (left) and his rival Jalili (right).
Born in September 1954, Pezeshiziyan is an Azerbaijani ethnic minority in western Iran. However, as a reformist politician, Pezeshizizyan's political resume is not too extensive.
He was a cardiac surgeon and served as the Rector of Tabriz Medical University before serving as Minister of Health for 4 years during the Khatami government. In addition, he served in the Iranian Parliament for 16 years and served as the First Deputy Speaker of the Iranian Parliament. He is also a veteran of the Iran-Iraq war, which helped him establish ties with the Iranian military in part.
▎ During the Iraq War, Massoud Pezeshiziyan (right) is on the front line.
In Iran's presidential election, Pezekhitsian is the only reformist candidate. In the first round of the presidential election on June 28, he received more than 10.4 million votes, beating the crowd of five hard-line candidates with 42.4 percent of the vote to enter the second round of the presidential election.
In the election, Pezeshiziyan won the support of reformist politicians such as former Iranian President Khatami and former Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif .
As a moderate politician, Pezeshchisyan has made economic issues a major campaign theme in his election platform, and has expressed a willingness to improve relations with the West, calling for negotiations with Western countries on the renewal of the final deal on the Iranian nuclear issue reached in 2015.
During his election campaign, he pledged to work with his opponents to address the many challenges facing Iran because "these challenges are too strong for infighting and disagreement to solve."
Low turnout sends popular discontent
For Iran, which is facing many domestic and foreign difficulties and pressures, this is an unplanned presidential election.
This presidential election is the first special election held due to the death of an incumbent president since Iran's constitutional reform abolished the post of prime minister in 1988 and established the president as head of state and government.
What's more, it is not a wonderful experience for Iranians to go to the polls twice in less than four months, after a parliamentary and expert committee elections in March, which had just undergone a very low turnout.
The data shows a subtle attitude towards the elections in Iran.
According to data released by the Iranian government, there are currently about 61 million eligible voters in Iran, and in the first round of voting on June 28, only about 24.5 million people participated in the vote, with a turnout rate of 40%, a record low. And in the July 5 vote, the number of voters who participated in the poll was about 30 million, and the turnout rate was about 49.8%, which was higher than the first round.
Despite calls from top Iranian leaders, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Ali Khamenei, to get out of their homes and vote in the run-up to the election, the turnout in the presidential election was only comparable to the 48.8 percent turnout in the 2021 presidential election, far below the 70 percent turnout in 2017.
In fact, after the final list of candidates for this election was determined, it was widely believed that Pezeshiziyan, as the only reformist candidate, could finally run for the election, which was a decision made by the Iranian top brass in order to increase the voter.
After the election went into the final showdown between Pezeshiziyan and Jalili, both candidates were actively shouting out to the 60% of voters who did not vote in the first round, but it was clearly ineffective. This is first and foremost a sign that Iranian voters are already disappointed with the overall political situation in Iran.
Because in the past few years, Iran's hard-line conservatives have "legitimately" purged a large number of reformist and moderate politicians, including former President Hassan Rouhani, from Iranian politics with the help of institutions including the Guardian Council of the Constitution, which has greatly dampened the political enthusiasm of moderate and reformist voters.
▎Election workers count votes at polling stations after the second round of the presidential election between Massoud Pezeshiziyan and Saeed Jalili in Tehran, Iran, July 6, 2024.
On the other hand, when low turnout favored the hardliners, Jalili, who had previously favored the hardliners, was defeated by a margin of about 3 million votes, which also reflects a certain degree of problem in mobilizing voters within Iran's conservatives.
In fact, even before the second round of voting, disagreements within Iran's hardliners were already on the surface, with many conservative politicians saying they would not support Jalili and mobilizing supporters to vote for Pezeshizizyan.
Some politicians have also warned that Jalili's claims are too extreme and will only deepen the domestic tensions and divisions that Iran is currently facing. This kind of cross-camp voting finally made Pezeshiziyang, who was unfavored before the election, have the last laugh.
However, this does not mean that during the term of office of the Pezeshciyan government, an alliance will really be formed between the conservatives and reformists in Iran, and the discord between the two sides in the economic, social, and diplomatic policy orientations has not changed, and the power game between the two sides will not stop on the premise of not endangering the fundamental institutions of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
The election results landed, and then what?
Despite the imminent inauguration of a new president, it may be difficult for Iran to emerge from the series of difficulties it currently faces. The position of president is very delicate in the power structure of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
On the one hand, the president is the only elected office in Iran's highest power system with clear term limits, which gives the presidency more representation to a certain extent. On the other hand, as the nominal head of government, the president's power in such fields as foreign affairs, defense, and finance is to a large extent subject to the interference and constraints of the Supreme Leader, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the parliament, etc., and does not have the final say on many issues.
This duality means that the president is accountable to the political forces that elected him to power, and on the other hand, he must follow the orders of religious leaders who really hold the supreme power, as Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Ali Khamenei has said on foreign affairs is the executive body of Iran's foreign policy, not the policymaker.
In this sense, the president plays more of a mediator than a policymaker in Iran's power system.
This also means that although Pezeshchiyan has finally taken the second seat in Iranian politics, there is not much real room for governance in Iran's two major institutions, the legislative and judicial institutions, which are fully controlled by the hardliners.
Many of Iran's problems seem to be internal affairs, but they are inextricably linked to foreign affairs.
For example, Iran has been facing the dilemma of high inflation and currency depreciation, although many Iranian governments have adopted various policies in the past to try to curb inflation and stabilize the value of the currency, but Iran's inflation rate is still hovering in double digits all year round, Iranian data released in May showed that Iran's inflation rate in April was 37%, down 12.1 percentage points year-on-year, the lowest level since 2021, but this is still much higher than the level after the final agreement on the Iranian nuclear issue was reached in 2015.
▎ The data shows that over the past decade, the sharp decline of the rial against the US dollar has led to higher import prices and weaker purchasing power. In addition, global and regional military and political instability, such as the conflict between Israel and Hamas, has further exacerbated the dollar's appreciation trend, putting additional pressure on the economy. Source: Financial Times
At that time, due to the lifting of some sanctions against Iran by the United States and Europe, Iran's crude oil exports recovered rapidly, and the Iranian economy experienced rapid growth for a period of time, and the inflation rate was once as low as about 10%.
But after Donald Trump was elected president of the United States and imposed maximum pressure sanctions on Iran, Iran's economy was once again in trouble, which in turn disappointed the reformists in the religious elite and the public who really wielded power, and put the hard-liner Raisi in the 2021 election.
However, although Raisi has made some achievements in diplomacy and other fields during his tenure, it has not fundamentally solved the problem of Iran's long-term pressure under sanctions, and Iran's economy has always been difficult to improve.
In the face of this situation, whether Pezeshiziyan, who is already inexperienced in the field of economic management, can properly handle these problems will be an important indicator for observing the trend of Iran's political situation in the future.
▎On May 19, 2024, former Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and former Foreign Minister Hossein Abdollahian were killed in a plane crash, and Raisi's death also exposed the contradictions and flaws in Iranian politics.
At the same time, the rapid changes in the geopolitics of the Middle East in the past few years, especially since 2023, have also made Iran face great challenges in the diplomatic and geopolitical fields.
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict, which has not been quelled to this day, as well as the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen who have been at loggerheads with the United States and Britain in the Red Sea region, coupled with Israel's recent threats to attack Lebanon's Allah forces with close ties to Iran, and Iran's near-direct conflict with Israel and the United States in February and April this year, have all posed great challenges to Iran's external environment and policy direction in the region.
With Iran's foreign and security policy decision-making circles dominated by hardliners, Pezeshiqiyan will face enormous challenges in winning Khamenei's support, promoting important policies such as easing Iran's relations with the West, and how to counterbalance the Iranian military and the hardliners of the Revolutionary Guards represented by the Quds Force, who are accustomed to acting on their own initiative.
▎An Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) military member wavs a victory gesture during a rally to mark International Quds Day, also known as Jerusalem Day, in downtown Tehran on April 29, 2022.
At present, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is 85 years old, the chairman of the Guardian Council of the Constitution Ahmad Jhanati is 97 years old, the chairman of the expert meeting is 93 years old, the director of justice is 68 years old, and the chairman of the National Interest Committee Sadiq Larijani is 61 years old.
As Raisi has long been seen as one of the favourites for Khamenei's potential successor, his death not only makes the prospect of a succession to the top of Iran's power even more uncertain, but also intensifies the power struggle within Iran.
▎ Ayatollah Saeed Ali Khamenei, leader of the Islamic Revolution
As a moderately reformist politician with little reputation, how Pezeshiqiyan finds a way out of the power labyrinth created by the hardliners to govern and how to rebuild the lifeline of the political alliance of Iran's moderates and reformists in the midst of Iran's complex and layered power structure will be the challenges that the "political dark horse" will have to face in the next four years.