Situation Report: A new president (s)elected in Iran

Iran has a new president—according to official reports Ebrahim Raisi has won the presidency with 18 million of the 28.9 million votes cast, or 62% of the vote.  Of course turnout was at an historic low, with the official tally at 48.8%, which suggests the real total is closer to 25%.  The buzzword in the media is that voters were “apathetic,” but apathy is a canard: “VOID”, or no vote, came in second to Raisi with 3.7 million votes—which is significantly higher than in any previous election.  This was not apathy.  This was an organized combination of silent boycott and protest in which more than half the country did not vote at all, while 12.7% of those who did bother to cast a ballot rejected all the approved candidates.

Raisi is the hand-selected candidate of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to whom he owes his political career.  Given that Khamenei is 83 and rumored to be in poor health, Raisi is already being touted as a potential successor for the Supreme Leader role (and Khamenei served two terms as President as well before becoming Supreme Leader in 1989, so there is a precedent).  Certainly the succession must have been at the front of Khamenei’s mind when he disqualified all the other serious candidates from running in this election.  But Raisi’s path to being Supreme Leader is far from assured as Khamenei’s goal may well be to have him pave the way for his son Mojtaba to ensure the family’s long-term fortunes as Supreme Leader.  Raisi would be ideal in this effort as he has an intimate knowledge of Khamenei finances having run one of their largest slush funds, Astan Quds Razavi, and could play the heavy ensuring any unrest around the demise of the Supreme Leader is brutally quashed before handing over the reigns to Mojtaba.

Meanwhile, there has been a deafening silence on the Iranian “elections” from the U.S. Department of State, which normally issues statements early and often about any elections around the world, no matter how obscure.  But inconveniently for the Biden administration, which is eagerly courting the Iranian regime in Vienna in the hopes of persuading them to comply with the terms of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Raisi is already under significant sanctions for his role in the whole-sale slaughter of Iranian political prisoners in 1989, as well as his participation in the brutal suppression of protests in Iran in 2009 and 2019.  While the Biden administration may try to lift these sanctions (imposed by executive order) on the grounds that they were part of a Trump administration effort to scuttle the JCPOA for good, the European Union also sanctioned Raisi on the same evidence, and Amnesty International has mounted a vocal campaign advocating for an investigation into him after the election results were announced.  So while unlike the outgoing president Hassan Rouhani, Raisi may well have the standing with the Supreme Leader and political clout to actually make a deal with the United States, it is not at all clear that the United States is going to be able to deal with him.