The U.S. presidential election in November is casting a shadow on the 28 June presidential election in Iran. That is because many in Iran see Donald Trump as a bogeyman who could emerge victorious, and that would be bad for any hope of understanding or compromise with the U.S. over Iran’s nuclear program—a prerequisite for the lifting of crippling economic sanctions. Trump had famously tweeted “No, thanks” to lifting sanctions on Iran. This could potentially put pressure on the next Iranian president to come to an understanding with the current U.S. administration, which in turn requires that the president of Iran display the necessary flexibility and political savvy to accomplish such a task. In effect, that would exclude Sa’id Jalili, notorious for his ideological inflexibility, and Alireza Zakani, perhaps the most politically clueless of the candidates in the race. If one of these two is declared the winner, however, that would suggest a hardening of attitude on the part of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Reformist commentator Mostafa Hashemitaba, himself a former presidential hopeful, worries about the ascendancy of Trump to the White House amid continually voiced hostility to the U.S. by Iranian officials. He suggests what path Iran should take, pointing out that higher levels of uranium enrichment by Iran in defiance of the JCPoA have produced nothing and only subjected the country to potential action by the UN Security Council, where Russia and China would not stand behind the Islamic Republic. In short, without saying so explicitly, he would like to see a deal between Iran and the U.S. as soon as possible. Sitting by reformist candidate Mas’ud Pezeshkian’s side during one of the candidate’s televised Q&A sessions, former foreign minister Mohammad-Javad Zarif showed how much the Islamic Republic was losing from the sanctions and how much more it could lose with a Trump victory. Zarif highlighted the loss of revenue from Iran’s discounted sale of crude to China, estimated at $12.5 billion a year because the Chinese could squeeze Iran for cheaper oil. This was true even after the Biden administration loosened up somewhat on his predecessor’s campaign of “maximum pressure” on the Islamic Republic. “Let Trump return,” warned Zarif ominously, “and then we will see what our friends will do.” A surprising position on sanctions and their economic impact on the lives of Iranians came from the presidential campaign of Mostafa Purmohammadi, a cleric and “traditional” principlist appearing in the garb of a pseudo-reformist. Turning to his economist daughter Monireh, who was sitting by him during his Q&A, Purmohammadi killed two birds with one stone, both appealing to female voters and at the same time showing that, like many reformists, he favors the removal of sanctions. Monireh Purmohammadi implied that politicians who denied the adverse effects of sanctions on Iran’s economy were lying. “The sanctions have a paralyzing and ruinous effect on the lives of the people of Iran,” she said.
Three other candidates, all representing the principlist-to-hardline end of Iran’s political spectrum, proved unwilling to revisit their stance on the sanctions and their harmfulness for Iran. Responding to Zarif’s defense of the Rouhani administration in the matter, Majles Speaker Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf clung to the apron strings of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who according to Qalibaf had shown his support for a Majles enactment in December 2020 that hardened Iran’s position against the JCPoA. Tehran Mayor Alireza Zakani considered Zarif’s position on the JCPoA and sanctions an “injustice” to Ebrahim Ra’isi, the late president who never showed that he understood the connection between sanctions and the Iranian economy. As for Sa’id Jalili, he failed to take account of the Biden administration’s greater leniency over Iran’s oil sales and attributed the increase in crude exports solely to Ra’isi, but he failed to account for what exactly the late president had done to facilitate such an improvement. The conservative news outlet Khorasan warns that the reformists, especially Zarif, have drawn the conservatives into a political game that advantages the reformist discourse. The resulting political polarization over a specific issue could be a repeat of the elections of 1997, 2013 and 2017, all of which resulted in the victory of reformists or pseudo-reformists. Khorasan recommends that principlists coalesce around a single candidate to give themselves a better shot at victory.
