You certainly can’t say that Iranian elections are boring. In 2005, Iranians surprised everybody by electing the darkest of dark horses, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, to the presidency. They didn’t know much about him but at least he seemed different from all the establishment candidates.
Well, he was different —not in a good way. By the 2009 election Ahmadinejad’s erratic and confrontational style had turned people off, and he should have lost — but he rigged the vote and triggered mass protests that badly frightened the regime before they were crushed.
Term limits prevented Ahmadinejad from running again this year and the Iranians pulled off another surprise. They elected Hassan Rouhani, the only moderate candidate among the six contenders, to the presidency in the first round. Rouhani got 50 per cent of the votes; his closest rival got only 16 per cent.
The foreign reaction to Rouhani’s victory was instantaneous. The United States offered to open direct talks with Tehran on Iran’s nuclear program as well as on bilateral relations. Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, by contrast, predictably warned that there should be no “wishful thinking” about Rouhani’s victory. So what is he: new broom, or another disappointment in the making?
Rouhani has been saying some interesting things. “What I truly wish is for moderation to return to the country,” he told the reformist daily Sharq. And he has repeatedly promised that both the nuclear issue and the resulting economic sanctions against Iran would be solved if he became president.
You might think that Rouhani’s highest priority, therefore, must be to end the sanctions that are crippling Iran’s economy and impoverishing ordinary voters. Not so: trust comes first. To retain credibility with the people who voted for him, he must first release Iran’s political prisoners.
After that, of course, he must make a deal with the Western countries that have waged a long campaign on Israel’s behalf against Iran’s alleged intention to build nuclear weapons. That is not impossible, for Iran is certainly not working on nuclear weapons now: the US National Intelligence Estimates of 2007 and 2011 both say so, and even the Israeli intelligence chiefs agree.
The whole campaign against Iran is based not on evidence but on mistrust: the conviction in some Western quarters (and most Israeli ones) is if Iran can enrich uranium, the “mad mullahs” are bound to build and use nuclear weapons in the end. But it is Iran’s right to build nuclear reactors and enrich fuel for them under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which it has signed and still observes.
So now that motormouth Ahmedinejad is gone and a saner leader is about to take the reins in Tehran, there could be a deal on the nuclear issue. It would be a deal that preserves the country’s right to enrich uranium, but strengthens the controls against enrichment to weapons grade (90 per cent). As with the question of releasing political prisoners, however, Rouhani must first get the assent of the Supreme Guide, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Khamenei, as the head of the theocratic side of the government, has the power to veto everything. However, he also wants to preserve this strange two-headed beast called the Iranian revolution, and that means he must retain popular consent. Western sanctions are bringing the Iranian economy to its knees, and people are really hurting. So maybe Khamenei will let Rouhani and his backers save him.
Gwynne Dyer is an independent journalist whose articles are published in 45 countries.