Two conservatives and a liberal are fighting to rule Iran after Raisi died in an accident | International

“For dancing in the streets”, “For all the times we were afraid to kiss our lovers” and “For women, life, and liberty”. Each verse of the song Baraye ,The song by 26-year-old Iranian musician Shervin Hajipour begins with “por” or “because” in Spanish and speaks of resistance to the right to veto in Iran. The prohibitions you point to Baraye They symbolize for many Iranians their lack of freedom. The last phrase of the lyrics of this song, “For women, life and freedom”, was the motto of the 2022 protests against the regime in Iran. Alone, the musician has been sentenced to almost four years in prison for “propaganda against the system and inciting riots”. While Hajipour is serving that sentence, Masoud Pezeshkian, one of the four candidates running for Iran’s presidential elections this Friday, has chosen “Baraye Iran” (For Iran) as his campaign motto and the melody that has become an anthem is playing at his rallies. For many opponents it has been an insult. Some have asked him on social media not to use this song in campaign events, in which he also declares his loyalty to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Pezeshkian, 69, is no opponent. Yes, those were the thousands of Iranians who took to the streets in September 2022, when the death in police custody of Yina Mahsa Amini, a young woman wrongly arrested for wearing a veil, sparked demonstrations whose repression killed at least 550 people, according to the United Nations. This presidential candidate is a liberal or “reformist”; the only candidate of that tendency against three representatives of various conservative factions also authorized to go to the polls. Two other conservatives have withdrawn this week. Only two of those three conservatives, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf and Saeed Jalili, the ultra-conservative former head of Iran’s nuclear negotiating team, are likely to win. This Friday’s electoral battle to replace Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, who died with his entourage in a helicopter crash on May 19, will be decided between these two conservatives and their reformist rival, a little-known cardiac surgeon who is a member of the Azeri minority.

Unreliable surveys released by pro-government organizations such as the Iranian Students Polling Agency (ISPA) predict a close result, with no clear favorite. The latest version of the ISPA poll released on Monday puts the moderate as the winner with 24.4% of the vote, while ultra-conservative Jalili got 24% and Qalibaf, who was given victory in other surveys, got 14.7%. If no one gets more than 50% of the vote, the two people with the most support will face each other in a second round.

Qalibaf, the former mayor of Tehran, started out as the favorite, but his candidacy is weakening, despite the fact that many consider him Khamenei’s favorite. This candidate, who presents himself as the “strong man” his country needs, has the essential support of Iran’s other great de facto power, the Revolutionary Guard, a body whose air force he commanded until 2000. His campaign has been marred, however, by corruption scandals that have affected him or his family. One of his daughters, Maryam Qalibaf, even had to appear on the country’s television on June 21 to explain why she returned from Turkey carrying nearly 300 kilos of expensive goods for the baby she is expecting in 2022. According to official figures, one-third of Iran’s population lives below the extreme poverty line.

Journalist Fereshteh Sadeghi expressed his disbelief in the Tehran elections. Above all, he considers victory “very difficult” for the reformists. “Pezeshkian lacks popularity. He is a local deputy from outside Tehran,” he stressed. On the other hand, he emphasizes that the reformists “can no longer convince their followers to vote after boycotting the three (previous) elections.” Political analysts also do not rule out the possibility that former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili will win “in the first round.” Jalili is the most conservative of the three candidates with options for the presidency; symbolizes remain so and proximity to the deceased Raisi. He is a supporter of the suppression of nude women and opposed to any commitment on nuclear matters with the West.

Rouzbeh Parsi, head of the Middle East and North Africa program at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs think tank, believes Pezeshkian “could win if conservatives remain divided” and don’t unify their votes around a single candidate. “That’s assuming there are no changes in the vote count,” he explains.

Disfellowship

In a system that provides for a pre-screening of candidates for political positions by the Guardian Council – an organization controlled by Khamenei – to guarantee their loyalty to the regime, even this single low-profile reformist candidacy has caused surprise, given that since the 2020 legislative elections, the regime’s ultra-conservative party controls practically all political power in Iran. Only six of the 80 presidential candidates, including four women, received the green light. Those excluded included the populist former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or the pragmatic former speaker of parliament Ali Larijani, far better known than Pezeshkian. The low profile of this surgeon, who was health minister under reformist president Mohammad Khatami in the 2000s, has raised suspicions among opponents that his candidacy is due to a strategy to show open and genuine political competition and thus attract disillusioned voters to the polls. In the March 1 legislative elections, only 41% of voters, 61 million Iranians, voted.

In 2010, Ayatollah Khamenei said that every vote was a vote of support for the Islamic Republic. “The supreme leader has had a very ambivalent attitude toward voter participation, with high electoral participation considered a validation of the regime’s legitimacy,” says analyst Parsi. Khamenei “now fears that an even greater decrease in participation may actually reflect the system’s deep unpopularity.”

In a signed open letter released this week, more than 500 Iranian teachers, trade unionists and well-known political prisoners such as the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Narges Mohammadi, have called for a boycott. A hashtag on social media also summarises how some Iranians view this Friday’s elections: #ElectionCircus.

In rallies where it resonated Well, Candidate Pezeshkian promised to liberalize Iranian foreign policy and promote a reduction in confrontation with the West if he became president, relieving sanctions for the nuclear program, which stifles even more than the powerful in Iran’s population. The doctor has declared that if it were up to him, he would abolish the moral police patrols that force Iranian women without headscarves into police vans by beating them or pulling their hair, but at the same time he has attributed the expressions of civil disobedience that go along with the removal of the hijab to poor “education”. His position is like that of a person trying to swim between two oceans, knowing that, on foreign policy and the issue of the headscarf, the president of Iran exerts influence, but the supreme leader always has the last word.

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