By any objective standard, the Iranian government is one of the most politically and socially intolerant, and is ruled by one of the world’s longest serving dictators, an 85-year-old Supreme Leader who describes himself as the Prophet Muhammad’s representative on earth. The Iranian regime maintains the pretense of a representative democracy by offering its citizens closed but competitive elections that often force voters to make a real choice between two types of loyalists to the regime: those who will do little to improve their lives, and those who could make their lives worse. Pezeshkian’s election reflects the unfortunate choice of the Iranian people.
Some Western policymakers may hope that Pezeshkian will be the catalyst for a long-awaited rapprochement with Iran. After all, the new president has signaled his support for the 2015 Iran nuclear deal signed by President Barack Obama and abandoned by President Donald Trump. But Americans should not succumb to hope rather than experience. Iran is now an obstacle in many areas of national security, including the conflicts in Gaza, Ukraine, Syria, and Yemen, nuclear proliferation, energy security, cybersecurity, and global efforts to control terrorism. Lacking a political base and public mandate, Pezeshkian will have even less influence on these issues than previous Iranian presidents.
This decline in influence is due to turmoil in Iran, with dashed hopes for the 2022-2023 “Women, Life and Freedom” protests and continuing economic decline, and early elections to choose a successor to President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May, drawing historically low voter turnout and leading to a runoff between two longtime regime loyalists.
During his election campaign, Pezeshkian portrayed himself as a reformer sympathetic to popular discontent, but also repeatedly described himself as a “fundamentalist” loyal to the ideological principles of the revolution and committed to Ayatollah Khamenei and his policies toward Iran (one of the main sources of discontent). Although he has in the past professed loyalty to the Revolutionary Guard and criticized U.S. “terrorist” and “criminal” policies, he campaigned alongside prominent diplomats with experience negotiating with the U.S., including former Foreign Minister Javad Zarif.
Pezeshkian’s opponent in the runoff election was Saeed Djalili, 58, a hardline ideologue and former nuclear negotiator whose doctoral thesis was on the foreign policy of the Prophet Muhammad. Given Pezeshkian’s unattractive policies and record (a video has resurfaced in which he bragged about trying to force women to wear the hijab when he was younger), his campaign has focused less on drumming up enthusiasm for the candidate and more on intimidating Djalili and his supporters by likening them to the Taliban.
The 60% of Iranians who stayed away from voting in the first round of the elections faced a real dilemma: Pezeshkian has neither the ability nor the desire to significantly change the Islamic Republic, but Jalili could accelerate the downward spiral of the Iranian economy and increase the likelihood of tougher economic sanctions and a potential conflict with the United States, especially in a second term for Trump.
“Should I vote and legitimize the regime,” a merchant friend in Tehran asked me hypothetically, “or should I refrain from voting and accept the potential consequences of President Jalili?” He told me that while he chose not to vote, he didn’t begrudge those who did.
“No one is naive enough to think that Pezeshkian or anyone in that corrupt regime can change Iran into what it should be,” Siamak Namazi, an American who was held hostage in Iran for eight years, told me, “but I would be terrified if Jalili was president.”
The history of Iran’s presidency offers little reason for optimism: since Khamenei became Supreme Leader in 1989, five Iranian presidents have come and gone (Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mohammad Khatami, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Hassan Rouhani and Ebrahim Raisi), none of whom have brought about any meaningful or lasting change in Iran’s power structure or in Iran’s behavior both at home and abroad.
Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which he commands, have consolidated power for decades and control the country’s complex political, judicial, media and surveillance systems. Social repression and endemic government corruption, mismanagement and incompetence remain unchanged regardless of who is president. Similarly, the Islamic Republic’s longstanding foreign policy – its opposition to the United States and Israel, its support for regional militias, its nuclear and military ambitions, its intimidation of dissidents abroad, and its holding of foreigners (including Americans) as hostages – persist.
One senior European diplomat in Tehran likened Pezeshkian’s selection to a different train car on the same track. “It’s not a question of what Pezeshkian wants to do,” he told me. “The question is what is he allowed to do. And there’s no evidence that the IRGC is going to change a lot of policies that are against our interests and against the interests of the Iranian people.”
While Pezechkian won’t change the administration’s strategic and ideological objectives, the foreign policy advisers he appoints are likely to be international English speakers, not naïve ideologues. For the United States, having a more agile Iranian diplomat at the helm means it may be easier to engage with the Islamic Republic of Iran, but harder to isolate it internationally.
The future of Iran and its relationship with the United States will be determined most significantly not by what happens after a new Iranian president takes office, but by what happens after Khamenei dies or leaves office.
Until then, Iranians will continue to feel frustrated by a regime they cannot tolerate, reform, or defeat, and America will continue to face an Iranian regime far more intent on fighting America than on advancing the interests of its people.
