Iran’s February 26 elections for the Majlis, or parliament, and for the Assembly of Experts, a clerically-dominated 88-member body that will select the successor to Iran’s current Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, was hailed as a victory for Iran’s moderates and an endorsement of President Hassan Rouhani’s centrist policies. There is substantial evidence to support this take on the elections, but commentators who have termed the elections as historic and as signaling a major shift in Iran’s political landscape surely go too far.
The elections, certainly in large and mid-sized urban centers, reflected strong middle class support for Rouhani’s policies, including the nuclear deal his government signed in July. The vote also suggests a rejection of right-wing extremism and xenophobia. Rouhani emerges in a stronger position. He will have an easier time securing legislation that encourages foreign investment; his ministers may face less harassment and attempts at impeachment by hardliners; and he has more scope to pursue normalization of relations with the international community.
However, irrespective of the composition of the new parliament, the instruments of power remain in the hands of the conservatives and hardliners; this suggests that no significant expansion of political freedoms at home or change in Iran’s foreign policy on vital issues abroad should be expected.
The elections for 290 parliamentary seats were contested by two loose political blocs: a coalition of moderate political factions, known as the Reformists and Supporters of the Government (RSG) and a coalition of conservative and hard line political groups, (who call themselves “principlists”), the Comprehensive Principlist Alliance. Since the Council of Guardians, a powerful twelve-man body that can rule on the qualifications of candidates, barred numerous prominent reformists from running, the so-called reformist “List of Hope” included many little-known moderates. In addition, in hopes of defeating the hard liners, the RSG included on their list a number of “centrist conservatives,” some who were, ironically, involved in suppression of political protest and the moderates in the past.
Operating under numerous handicaps, the RSG coalition did surprisingly well. The moderate list made a clean sweep of all 30 seats in the coveted Tehran constituency—the most important in the country. The moderates also did well in other large cities, including Isfahan and Shiraz, and seem poised to do well in Tabriz, Ahwaz and a number mid-sized urban areas where no candidate secured over 25 percent of the vote and elections will go to a second round.
Equally striking was the success in Tehran of the moderates in the Assembly of Experts election. Here, an allied “List of Hope” put together by former president Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, a supporter of the moderates, won 15 of 16 seats allotted to the capital (Rouhani and Rafsanjani were among those elected). In addition, both in the parliamentary and the Assembly elections many hardliners suffered defeats. In the Assembly elections, Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati barely squeaked in with the smallest number of votes in the Tehran list of elected candidates; and Mohammad Yazdi, the chairman of the outgoing assembly, and Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, the ideologue of the hardliners, failed to get re-elected at all.
Voters in the capital appear to have heeded the RSG plea that they vote for the “30+16” on the “List of Hope” as a bloc. That they did so, although many on the list were relatively unknown, speaks to a general preference for the moderation, political relaxation, and openness to the world advocated by Rouhani, as against the spirit of continuing revolution and confrontation with the world advocated by the conservatives and their hard line allies.
On a rough estimate, of the 221 seats decided in the first round of the parliamentary elections, the moderate and conservative blocs each won about 80 seats and independents 60 seats. If this trend is confirmed in the second round elections in April for the remaining 69 seats, the new Majlis will be divided into three slightly unequal blocs of reformists, conservatives, and independents.
President Rouhani emerges from the elections with a stronger hand. But this does not presage a major shift in foreign policy and has little implications for the urgent question of political liberalization at home. The fact remains that the Iranian parliament has little say on major foreign policy issues. It is hard to recall an instance in the past many years when any deputy in parliament, let alone a parliamentary bloc, questioned Iran’s financial and military support for Syria’s beleaguered President Assad, its commitment to the destruction of Israel, its build-up of Shi’ite militia’s in Iraq, or its recent involvement in the civil war in Yemen.
These are all bedrock pillars of Iran’s foreign policy, determined by the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, with the support of the Revolutionary Guards; they lie outside the purview of parliament or the Rouhani government. Iran’s relations with Saudi Arabia offer a good illustration of the fate of Rouhani’s attempt at a more moderate foreign policy. While, the Saudis share the blame for the strained relations between the two countries, the fact remains that Rouhani’s wish for better relations with the Saudis and Iran’s other Arab neighbors in the Persian Gulf is belied and undercut by Iran’s policies in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and elsewhere.
The nuclear deal that Rouhani’s team negotiated with the U.S. and its partners was a signal achievement, has led to a partial lifting of the severe sanctions imposed on Iran and will help stimulate the economy. There has been some easing of relations between Iran and the United States. But Iran’s Supreme Leader continues to warn against supposedly nefarious American cultural and economic “penetration” of Iran; and rather than economic integration continues to emphasize “the economy of resistance.” Rouhani, clearly, must overcome many hurdles.
It is also unlikely that Rouhani can turn a strong showing in the recent parliamentary elections into leverage for political liberalization. His first three years as president have shown he carries little weight with the Intelligence Ministry, the security agencies, and the judiciary. Implicit in the platform on which he successfully ran for president in 2013 was the release of the opposition leaders, Mir Hossein Musavi and Mehdi Karrubi. They have been under house arrest since the massive protests against what many regarded as the rigged 2009 elections. Yet the two men are still not free.
Occasionally, Rouhani has spoken in favor of greater freedom of speech, less harassment of college students on university campuses, and more political openness, but to no avail. Large numbers of intellectuals, journalists, film-makers, poets, writers, feminist activists, and human rights lawyers remain under arrest and are sentenced to long prison terms by courts that do the bidding of the security services. Rouhani seems helpless to do anything about these blatant violations of individual rights.
What of the future? Supreme Leader Khamenei is 78 years old. Despite rumors to the contrary, he is seemingly in reasonable health; but the new Assembly of Experts, which sits for eight years, will almost certainly select his successor when he dies or can no longer perform his duties.
Maneuvering over the succession is inevitable, given the enormous powers vested in the Supreme Leader. Iran’s wily old politician, Hashemi-Rafsanjani, appears to be maneuvering to create in the Assembly a block of moderate members with enough weight to pick a centrist, someone like Rouhani, as the next Supreme Leader. However, the success of the moderate list in Tehran notwithstanding, the Assembly remains dominated by conservatives and hardliners which each have their own candidates for the succession. A decision on the succession is some years away. This time, the increasingly powerful commanders of the Revolutionary Guards are likely to insist on being consulted.
Besides, there is little precedent on which to base a prediction for the future. The Assembly of Experts did name Khamenei as Khomeini’s successor when the founder of the Islamic Republic passed away in 1989. But in that instance, the assembly merely rubber-stamped what a small coterie of insiders (led by Rafsanjani) claimed was Khomeini’s own wish. Which way the assembly will lean in the future, towards moderation or the choice of another hardliner as leader, remains far too early to tell.
