June 25, 2021
The 2021 presidential campaign was a decidedly low-key affair dominated by three televised debates in which the five Principleist candidates spent most of their time attacking the two Reformist candidates and vice versa.
Because of the coronavirus restrictions, there was little of the hoopla of campaigning in most countries. Ebrahim Raisi held a rally in Ahvaz in a stadium. (Indoor rallies were forbidden by the health authorities.)
State television allowed each candidate to produce a 30-minute campaign program and the various candidates appeared for interviews as well as in the three televised debates over the 18 day campaign. But state television rejected the program submitted by Abdolnasser Hemmati.
The Council of Guardians, as expected, approved Judiciary Chairman Ebrahim Raisi as a candidate for the June 18 presidential elections but it vetoed all three of his most prominent opponents First Vice President Es’haq Jahangiri of the Reformists, former President Mahmud Ahmadi-nejad of his own faction, and former Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani, who now describes himself as a “conservative Reformist.”
The 12-man Council of Guardians approved seven candidates five of them from the Principleist or conservative faction and two vaguely aligned with the Reformist faction.
It shut everyone else out including the half-dozen Pasdar officers many had expected to play a big role. The rejection of all the Pasdar careerists suggested that the Council members, six of whom are clerics, were not disposed to allowing the military to have a bigger say in politics.
They did approve the candidacy of Mohsen Rezai, who commanded the Pasdaran for 16 years in the 1980s and 1990s, but has served in a civilian role as secretary of the Expediency Council ever since then. This was the third time Rezai had been approved to run for president. He has never done well.
Of the five Principleists put on the ballot, only Raisi, Rezai and Saeed Jalili are widely known. Jalili was the secretary of the Supreme National Security Council for part of Ahmadi-nejad’s time as president and handled the nuclear negotiations with the West, where he gained notoriety for giving long-winded, ideological speeches that ignored the substance of the talks.
The other Principleist candidates were a current and a former deputy in the Majlis.
The two Reformists were Mohsen Mehralizadeh, head of sports under President Moham-mad Khatami, who has long been active in Reformist circles, and Abdolnasser Hemmati, governor of the Central Bank, who came under heavy criticism for raging inflation and the miserable economy. He is not actually a Reformist but a moderate who is a member of the party formed three decades ago to support then-President Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani.
Hemmati crossed a red line by saying that as president he would not deal confrontationally with the United States, but would work to smooth out relations. Surprisingly, the Principleist candidates did not attack him for that. Hemmati also said he would be willing to meet with US President Biden. And he crossed yet another red line by criticizing the country’s mandatory hejab law. And then he crossed still another by pledging to name five women to his cabinet.
Rezai raised many a viewer’s eyebrows when he responded to Hemmati in the first debate by saying he would bar Hemmati from leaving the country and “prove in court the treacherous roles” Hemmati and others have played in the government.
Raisi implicitly supported returning to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) and none of the other Principleist candidates denounced the nuclear agreement. It appeared they had been told not to run against the agreement. They all came across as remarkably moderate and none came out with flaming anti-foreign rhetoric, seeming to telegraph that they believed the public was wearied by the constant blaming of other countries for Iran’s problems.
They all promised to do a better job than President Rohani of managing the economy. But they spoke in slogans and said little concrete about the economy. The standard response in the debates from Raisi was, “We will solve these problems in time.”
First Vice President Es’haq Jahangiri was approved to run for president four years ago. This time he was among the favored figures from the left to succeed Rohani, who could not run again under term limits. Jahangiri’s prominence made it unsurprising that he was rejected by the Council of Guardians.
Raisi ran chiefly as an anti-corruption fighter while most of the other candidates campaigned on economic issues, promising to create jobs and build the economy. None has had much to say about the nuclear agreement. And Iran’s dire drought conditions also went largely unmentioned.
It was no surprise that former President Mahmud Ahmadi-nejad was rejected. He was also rejected four years ago. While signing up this year, he said he would boycott the elections if he were prevented from running. And he advocated a boycott several times before the balloting.
The most interesting rejection was that of former Speaker Ali Larijani, who ran for president as a conservative in 2005 and did not even get 6 percent of the vote. But in the last few years, he has recast himself in the pragmatist image of Rafsanjani, working closely with the Rohani Administration to get its legislation through the Majlis.
A number of analysts looked at Larijani’s disqualification as delegitimizing a Raisi win, because, they reason, conservatives who don’t like Raisi would have voted for Larijani. That, of course, cannot be proven. However, websites and social media channels run by Raisi supporters had targeted Larijani more than any other candidate after he registered, calling him everything from a Rohani acolyte to a British agent.
Perhaps the most curious aspect of Larijani’s rejection is the fact that his brother, Sadeq Larijani, who preceded Raisi as chief of the Judiciary, is one of the 12 Guardians who must approve names to go on the ballot. Sadeq Larijani publicly bristled at the approved list. He said in a tweet that in his 20 years on the council, he has “never found its decisions so indefensible.” He said he found fault with the council’s decisions on both those who were qualified and those disqualified, alleging interference by security organizations in the decision-making process.
Raisi released a short video before the candidate list was announced but after it was leaked by the Fars news agency in which he said he was urging the Guardians to qualify other candidates in order to make the election more “competitive.” But Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi soon made a speech lauding the Council of Guardians for its decisions and effectively ending all talk of adding more candidates.
Among those rejected was Ali Motahari, formerly a conservative, but who has become eclectic in his politics like Ali Larijani in recent years. He said he was told he was rejected because he has a daughter living in the United States. A daughter of Larijani is studying medicine in Ohio. Larijani demanded that the Council of Guardians publicly reveal why he was rejected.
Altogether, 592 people registered to run, but the Council only considered the 40 people who submitted all the required paperwork. It did not identify those 40 nor give the reasons for rejecting them. A prospective candidate had to get seven votes among the 12-man council to win a spot on the ballot. The Islamic Republic is often criticized for rejecting hundreds of people who register to run, but the truth is that the vast majority of the rejectees can only be described as nobodies who just walked in off the street and filed their names but have never been active in public issues.