Who was who in the Iranian presidential election? (UPDATE: And the winner is . . .)

Was Saeed Jalili, described in a February Reuters head as "rigid ideologue close to Khamenei," the Supreme Leader's guy in today's Iranian presidential election? Nobody seems to know.

"Where the Supreme Leader is concerned, [Mohammad Baqer] Qalibaf and [Hassan] Rowhani have got to be the two least attractive candidates. Neither has the profile of an ideological true believer or an unquestioningly faithful lieutenant. Khamenei has had enough of Presidents who challenge him from bases of power of their own. But to sideline these two relatively popular figures in favor of a dour foreign-policy bureaucrat would be a hard sell to the Iranian people. Iranian elections may not be transparent exercises in popular sovereignty, but neither are they decided by naked diktat. It will be interesting to see how this election reconciles the drives for legitimacy and for unity at the top."

-- Laura Secor, in a newyorker.com blogpost,
"Iran's Choice on Election Day"

by Ken

Possibly there are readers who, like me, have been sitting out the Iranian presidential election. It's not as if there's anything we can do about it, or for that matter any great likelihood that the winner, whoever he is, stands much chance of changing anything, with overall control of the country's affairs still pretty much at the mercy of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. But as Laura Secor, who has been covering Iran for The New Yorker, having visited since 2004, writes in her newyorker.com blogpost "Iran's Choice on Election Day":

There really is no such thing as a dull election in Iran. This alone is testament to the incurable persistence of dissent, or of fractiousness, within Iran's inner circle of power; to the relentless optimism of its voting public; to an irreducible flexibility at the core of the Islamic system, which bedevils those who would close its ranks.

About as much as I had gleaned about the election before reading Secor's piece was that the four candidates are mostly foreign-policy guys, and are all hard-liners. Well, that appears to be serious oversimplification. There are, it appears, two candidates who, as suggested in the quote above (the conclusion of the piece), aren't likely to ease the Supreme Leader's digestion. One of them, Hassan Rowhani, even has the support of two former presidents who are not at all favorites of Khamenei: the famously reformist Mohammad Khatami and the more distantly remembered Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was chairman of Iran's parliament from 1980 to 1989 and then succeeded (the not-yet-supreme) Khamenei as president. Khamenei is presumed to have been involved in the disqualification of Rafsanjani from running in this election.

HASSAN ROWHANI

Rowhani happens to have occupied the position now occupied by one of the front-runners, Saeed Jalili, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council ("the country's foreign-policy-making body"), from 1989 through 2005, and could hardly have approached the job more differently.

[H]is flexible approach was the one that Jalili reversed. Under Rowhani's stewardship, Iran had suspended uranium enrichment, a concession that was roundly criticized by hard-liners. Rowhani is a pragmatic figure, associated, above all, with former President Rafsanjani, who was himself disqualified for running in this election. Now Rafsanjani and another former President, the reformist Mohammad Khatami, have united behind Rowhani, throwing him the support of disaffected urban youth, and persuading another reformist candidate to withdraw in Rowhani's favor. Although his record on civil liberties is thin, Rowhani now carries that agenda into the race, along with the frustrated hopes of the vanquished Green Movement, whose leaders, Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, remain under house arrest.

MOHAMMAD BAQER QALIBAF

"The candidate to watch for my money," Secor writes, "is the one nobody is talking about."

Unlike the others, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf does not come out of the foreign-policy establishment but out of the military; he served in the Iran-Iraq War and, later, as commander of the Revolutionary Guard's Air Force. Since 2005, he has been the mayor of Tehran. It is no accident that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad held the same job. Ever since 1999, when the reformist government of Mohammad Khatami instituted popular elections for city and provincial councils, the municipality of Tehran has been a semi-independent political machine. The reformists, who held the city from 1999 to 2003, never managed to harness it to their ambitions. But the previously unknown faction of conservatives who succeeded them propelled their mayor, Ahmadinejad, to the Presidency, peopled his government, and gave the more traditional conservative establishment a run for its money.

Qalibaf has now had eight years at the capital's helm. He is a hard-liner with a security background, he's proud of his role in violently suppressing street demonstrations, and he's credited by his allies with efficiency. He has executive experience and close ties to the Revolutionary Guard. As a result, unlike Jalili or Velayati, Qalibaf brings his own money, popular appeal, and institutional support, most significantly from within the Revolutionary Guard. Unlike Rowhani, he does not carry the baggage of two former Presidents whom the Supreme Leader has worked tirelessly, and at cost, to exclude from the scene.

AS FOR THE FRONT-RUNNERS . . .

The curious thing is that no one seems to know which of the two, Jalili and Ali Akbar Velayati (who was minister of foreign affairs for 16 years, under both Khamenei and Rafsanjani, and "has been a close foreign-policy adviser to the Supreme Leader"), is favored by Khamenei. In a country where the leader has that much power, naturally a lot of people have wanted to know.

JALILI, Secor writes,

is the most rigid and ideological candidate in this Presidential race. Years ago, a European diplomat based in Tehran confided to me that he and his colleagues found Jalili impossible. You couldn't have a conversation with the guy, the diplomat said; he just recited positions as though he were reading from a script. This was no accident. Jalili, who is forty-seven, assumed the nuclear portfolio in 2007, and presided over a retrenchment of Iranian foreign policy under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Conciliatory gestures toward the West had availed Iran little, proponents of the new strategy argued, with some justification. Iran would do better to adopt a tougher stance. Kayhan, a newspaper associated with the office of the Supreme Leader, has praised Jalili, calling him a "super Hezbollahi," which is something many read as an endorsement. Curiously, though, Kayhan's repeated calls for conservatives to drop out of the race and unite behind a single candidate have gone unheeded.

VELAYATI, however, had been "pegged as the Leader's pick and as the odds-on favorite to carry the election," which left many observers puzzled by Kayhan's virtual endorsement of Jalili. As foreign minister, Velayati negotiated the end of the war with Iraq, and in his recent incarnation as a foreign-policy adviser to Khamenei, he has been --

so trusted, in fact, that for decades journalists leaned in closely when he spoke, hoping to read the Leader's intentions. In a debate this week, Velayati pounced on Jalili, accusing him of lecturing his European counterparts as though he were teaching a philosophy class and failing to move the ball even an inch. What, exactly, had Jalili accomplished in the past eight years, apart from bringing sanctions down on Iranians' heads? How could he hope to wring anything from the Americans without showing the slightest flexibility himself?

If this suggests some indecision about foreign policy at the higher policy-making levels, this is in fact what Secor herself divined when she covered the Iranian parliamentary elections last year. "A question I brought with me was whether there was a debate over the direction of Iranian foreign policy within the Islamic Republic's inner circle." And now here was an open rift between the two leading candidates in a presidential debate.

Of course, even with major foreign-policy issues confronting Iran (e.g., its nuclear policy and how to deal with the Syrian crisis), the president has very little say, since foreign-policy is exclusively the Supreme Leader's preserve. However, as Secor writes, "The choice of President is, at the very least, an indicator of the direction policy will take."

I don't know whether we'll know the election result by the time this appears. But whenever we do, at least now I will have some idea of what just happened.


UPDATE: AND THE WINNER IS . . . ROWHANI

From washingtonpost.com:

Moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani wins Iran’s presidential vote

By Jason Rezaian

TEHRAN — Hassan Rouhani, a moderate Shiite cleric known as one of Iran’s leading foreign policy experts, has won the election to succeed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the Islamic Republic’s next president, Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar announced Saturday evening.

With results from all the precincts in, Rouhani had won 50.7 percent of the votes, avoiding a runoff, Mohammad-Najjar said.

The mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, came a distant second, with 16.6 percent of the vote. Saeed Jalili, Iran’s hard-line nuclear negotiator, came third with 11.4 percent. A handful of other conservative candidates fared poorly.

After a surge of support in the final week of campaigning from Iranians who did not plan to vote, Rouhani won a surprising decisive majority in a field of six candidates considered loyal to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. . . .

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