Iran’s new president promises bold reform – under the watchful eye of Khamenei

The outcome of Iran’s weekend election has once again propelled a centrist candidate from the reformist faction of the country’s Islamic regime to the top political office. While historic and a sign of the growing dissatisfaction within Iran, the challenges confronting the new president cannot be overestimated.

Masoud Pezeshkian, who beat his ultra-conservative opponent, Saeed Jalili, has promised to put Iran on a course of reform and moderation on the domestic and foreign policy fronts. As an experienced former legislator and health minister, the former heart surgeon has a public mandate within Iran’s restricted electoral legitimacy to initiate substantial changes. Pezeshkian needs to improve his country’s faltering social and economic landscape, and foreign relations with the West, and thus arrest the waning power base of the Islamic regime.

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian.Credit: AP

Many Iranians have grown deeply disillusioned with the regime’s theocratic impositions, including compulsory hijab wearing for girls and women, economic mismanagement, and an inability to rein in endemic corruption. They have equally shunned the regime’s costly maintenance of regional proxy forces – the Iraqi militias, Syrian regime, Lebanese Hezbollah and Yemeni Houthis – against their arch enemies, Israel and the United States. Further, they have at least partially blamed the regime for the debilitating US-led sanctions impacting their declining living conditions.

There have been growing calls for an end to the regime’s system of Shiite rule of the “Islamic Jurist” under a powerful “supreme leader” – a position Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has held since 1989, following the death of regime’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Khamenei has presided over the system as the final decision-maker on all important issues. He has done so with vital help from conservative clerics and their supporters, who have controlled most of the levers of power since 1979.

The victory for Pezeshkian, though, is not the first time that a centrist reformist has come to power. Pezeshkian’s predecessors, Mohammad Khatami and Hassan Rouhani, were also like-minded, seeking to address public discontent and improve foreign relations. But their achievements were limited and frustrated by conservatives, including Jalili.

Khatami stood for Islamic democracy and civil society and a “dialogue of civilisation” in foreign policy. Rouhani negotiated the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement with world powers, including the US, which limited Iran’s uranium enrichment to 3.67 per cent for peaceful purposes. But the deal was wrecked by then US president Donald Trump in 2018, who withdrew from the agreement, while accusing Iran of being a regional threat. Since then, Iran has accelerated its uranium enrichment to a threshold level.

Whenever the chips have been dangerously down, the supreme leader and the conservative factions have pragmatically allowed the reformist faction to rise to the occasion and smooth out some of the rough edges of the Islamic regime’s behaviour. But only to the extent so as not to undermine their dominance in the power structure.

Iran’s governance needs structural changes to streamline its increasingly unworkable two-tier system of governance: the all-powerful supreme leader embodying the sovereignty of God, and the elected president and national assembly representing the sovereignty of the people, but subordinate to the first tier.

Pezeshkian, however, stands a better chance than his reformist predecessors. He is strongly backed by Khatami, Rouhani and former foreign minister Javad Zarif, along with the majority of voters. The fact that the Guardian Council, where Khamenei holds considerable sway and which vets candidates, approved Pezeshkian’s run indicates the supreme leader is content for the reformists to have another go.

Khamenei knows that the state-society dichotomy has dangerously widened, and that Iran is amid a regional situation whereby it potentially faces a war with Israel and the US over its support of Hamas and the Palestinian cause, and its “axis of resistance”.

Beyond this, the Islamic regime faces a change in supreme leader sooner rather than later. Khamenei is 85, with no apparent successor. President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in an air crash in May, and Khamenei’s son, Mujtaba, were touted as possible successors. Although Mujtaba remains in the race, it is now in Khamenei’s interest to leave behind a factional balance and more stable Islamic system for the choice of a successor that would ultimately be determined by the constitutional body of the Council of Experts, whose task is to appoint and dismiss a supreme leader.

As a result, the new president will have an opportunity to press on with some of his economic, social and foreign policy reforms to promote a more humane face of the Islamic regime. But his moves will be watched closely not only by a sceptical West, but more importantly by his internal opponents, who will want to make sure he does not engage in any structural changes to undermine their dominance in the system. Given his allegiance to the Islamic system of governance, Pezeshkian has his work cut out for him.

Amin Saikal is an emeritus professor at the Australian National University and adjunct professor at the University of Western Australia, and author of Iran Rising: The Survival and Future of the Islamic Republic.

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