Iran Snap Elections: A Race Between Hardliners

Hardliners, hardliners and more hardliners are going to be the likely choices Iranians will have to choose from when it comes to next month’s snap election after the death of their president in a helicopter crash.

“It's just a contest between different hardliners, and they're all devoted to [Supreme Leader Ali] Khamanei,” said Arash Azizi, Iran analyst and author of ‘What Iranians Want: Woman, Life, Freedom.

Azizi said an important question is which hardliners will run and which organizations will support it, and if centrists and so-called reformists are allowed to run, who will it be and how will everyday Iranians react given epic low voter turnouts in the last few years?

In March, less than 10% of Iranians voted in parliamentary by-elections. Many observers believe real turnout in the last two previous elections has been around 20-30 per cent.

As the registration for Iran’s presidential elections draws near on May 30 and closes on June 3, Azizi ’s list of potential candidates are as follows:

Saeed Jalili: He’s an ultra-hardliner who confirmed his candidacy this weekend. According to Azizi, he is unpopular and "very widely hated.” Azizi described his main path to be ordering the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) to beat up women on the streets of Iran. Jalili was the secretary of the National Security Council between 2005 to 2013 and was the chief nuclear negotiator. Azizi said “he was an absolute disaster in that position.” With a PhD on diplomacy of the Prophet Mohammad, Azizi said Jalili was not the ‘career diplomat’ type to get the job done.

Parviz Fattah: Azizi said he was the head of the Execution of Imam Khomeini’s Orders Headquarters. “They're called parastatal foundations. It is an organization, whose head is appointed by Khamenei. And they were built by expropriating the wealth of, you know, Iranians before 1979. And they use that to do all sorts of things,” said Azizi. He said Fattah’s base is with the IRGC and military caste.

Saeed Mohammad: Azizi described him as being similar to Fattah and came from a background in the IRGC. He’s much younger than other potential candidates being in his 50s and he tried to run in 2021 but was barred from the Guardian Council.

Ali Larijani: Azizi calls him a “Centrist conservative” only because he supported so-called centrist former President Hassan Rouhani in the past election. He’s the former speaker of the parliament and hails from the religious center of Qom. “He is also currently from the foundation of the regime. His brother was the head of the Expediency Council. Sadeq Larijani, who was the former head of the judiciary, a potential kind of a Supreme Leader even at some point, one of his other brothers, was a key sort of people person in the Iranian Foreign ministry for many years, the key clerical family that had been sidelined by the regime in recent years,” added Azizi.

Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, is the current Parliament Speaker. Azizi said Ghalibaf is “also a conservative hardliner in some way, but known to be much more technocratic than ideological.” According to Azizi’s sources there was a meeting between Iran’s Supreme Leader and Ghalibaf that did not go well. He said he has a lot of political ambition with a deep IRGC past.

Freelance journalist and former senior analyst with the US government Behrouz Turani believes the conservative camp is going to win the election with the full support of the Interior Ministry, the Guardian Council and the Supreme leader.

“Iranians have not been going to the polls to vote, at least since 2021, because they don't have anyone to vote for. That is, the main problem about the Iranian election. It's not representative. It's not fair. It's not free. It generally depends on what the political system and what the Supreme Leader want from the election,” said Turani.

He said that no one in Iran can directly elect their president, instead “the biases and preferences for the Guardian Council, which is, supervised by, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei,” decide how things will go.

The elections are happening during an economic crisis as Turani put it, “the biggest crisis in the lifetime of the Islamic Republic in the past 45 years.”

“This election is tremendously important for the government, but the nation has shown during the past maybe eight years even that they have no interest whatsoever in any kind of elections because they, are led by the government itself to believe that, no president, no parliament in Iran is going to serve their interest,” Turani told Iran International.

He said if Larijani is allowed to run for president there may be some sort of chance for the US and Iran to resume ties and that would help with what Turani described as a ‘catastrophic’ economic situation in the country.

Turani pointed out the timing of Iran’s elections are critical with the US elections only a few months away. Azizi said even political commentators in Iran have said whoever takes charge needs to be able to come up against Donald Trump if he is elected president.

"Tehran is definitely thinking about Trump," said Azizi.