Washington Post: Whoever wins the election will be met with excellent leader
matter-who-wins-irans-election-hell-have-a-fight-with-the-supreme-leader/?utm_term=.e1f2243f99c3
No matter who wins Iran’s election, he’ll have a fight with the
supreme leader
Why Ayatollah Ali Khamenei always sours on the elected leaders.
By Jason Rezaian May 19 at 4:00 AM
Jason Rezaian served as The Post's correspondent in Tehran from 2012
to 2016. He spent 545 days unjustly imprisoned by Iranian authorities until his
release in January 2016.
Rouhani’s relationship with Khamenei is still cordial — for now.
(Abedin Taherkenareh / EPA)
On Friday, Iran will elect its next president. More than 1,600 people
registered as candidates, but only six were approved by the 12-member Guardian
Council, the appointed religious authorities. The front-runners are
EbrahimRaisi, Iran’s hard-line former attorney general who now runs the
country’s holiest site, and Hassan Rouhani, the popular moderate incumbent.
Just like in the United States, these quadrennial contests often pit
conservatives against progressives, or their theological equivalents.
But no matter who wins, one thing is almost certainly true: The
president will have a grueling experience working with the supreme leader,
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The election is only the first, fleeting battle. The
next one unfolds slowly, often in secret, and cannot really be won. In every
case, it has ended with bitterness, resentment and mutual distrust between the
country’s two most powerful men.
A presidential election is the most obvious challenge to Khamenei’s
authority. It is the one time when the people of Iran can voice, in unison,
their opinion about the direction the country should take. An Iranian
president, as an elective officeholder, has to win popular support — he is the
people’s choice. While the supreme leader can exercise final say on all state
matters, he is not an avatar of popular sovereignty, an asymmetry he faces with
every president.
Khamenei himself served as Iran’s president in the 1980s, before the
Assembly of Experts, a group of more than 80 clerics tasked with choosing and
supervising the supreme leader, elevated him to the ultimate position after the
death of Ruhollah Khomeini, the system’s founder. So he understands what power
the president wields. Since then, he and successor presidents have developed a
sometimes cooperative approach. “The supreme leader might have the ultimate say
on all major decisions,” says MehrzadBoroujerdi, a political scientist at
Syracuse University. “But he’s not a leviathan that everyone obeys without
question.” His office, with its unchecked executive power and control of the
armed forces, was designed to maintain revolutionary principles, while the
presidency could be geared toward the pragmatic work of managing and developing
the country.
But just as often, the roles are at odds. In the early years of
Khamenei’s leadership, information was disseminated only through
state-controlled channels, which portrayed the Islamic establishment as wholly
unified. Now, much greater and faster access to unfettered information is
available nationwide, despite official bans, and ordinary citizens are far more
aware of the fissures that exist in public opinion and government. When a
president’s successes became more measurable, so did his perceived threat to
Khamenei’s standing.
This dynamic has played out repeatedly. Mohammad Khatami, who was
elected with nearly 70 percent of the vote in 1997, ushered in social reforms
within the system’s rules and regulations, always respecting Khamenei’s
authority. In turn the leader initially supported Khatami. But as the first
term ended, Khamenei ratcheted up his criticism of the president’s policy of
expanded social freedoms, which were deemed by hard-liners as
anti-revolutionary. Khamenei calls reform a “change in attitude,” away from his
idea of true Islam.
Khatami won reelection in a 2001 landslide, but Khamenei delayed his
inauguration over disputes between their political factions. Then, years after
the president left office, Iran’s conservative judiciary banned state
media from showing images of, or even mentioning, Khatami, arguably the most
revered figure in the regime’s history. Because of the widespread use of social
media in Iran, however, Khatami is still a key voice in Iranian politics; he
threw his weight behind Rouhani again this year.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came next. He won his first term in 2005, offering
a platform that sounded more like the Iranian traditionalism the supreme leader
is known for. Then, in 2011, Ahmadinejad tried to increase his own presidential
powers when he forced Iran’s intelligence minister to resign, a move that
Khamenei did not approve. A two-week standoff ended when Ahmadinejad acquiesced
to the minister’s reinstatement. After that, Khamenei distanced himself from
the president. Figures close to the supreme leader began referring to
Ahmadinejad’s inner circle as a “deviant current” that was attempting to
undermine clerical rule. The moniker stuck, and although the president never
faced criminal charges, several of his cabinet members ended up in prison.
Rouhani’s victory in the 2013 election — winning more than half the
vote in a field of six candidates — was widely considered a rebuke of
Khamenei-championed policies that led to years of international isolation and
economic sanctions. Rouhani’s nuclear deal, struck with President Barack Obama,
lifted those measures; it is the single biggest diplomatic achievement in the
nearly four-decade history of the Islamic Republic. Now Rouhani is focused on
expanding civil liberties, calling for freedom of expression and an end to
political arrests. Khamenei has yet to intervene, and relations are still
relatively cordial, but the pattern suggests it is only a matter of time until
they fray.
“If the past is any indication, some level of disagreement should be
expected,” says Mohsen Milani, executive director of the Center for Strategic
& Diplomatic Studies at the University of South Florida. He suggests areas
of possible friction in how Iran should respond to President Trump, an Arab
alliance or Iran’s role in supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
Raisi, Rouhani’s opponent, is a conservative protege of Khamenei. Yet
a victory for the conservative in Friday’s election would not exempt him from
the forces that, over the long run, would strain his relations with the supreme
leader, just as they hurt Ahmadinejad’s.
Even Khamenei’s closest alliance could not withstand the pressures
that drive the country’s leaders into conflict. After he became leader, his
close friend Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani won election as president, an office
he held from 1989 to 1997. Rafsanjani had been integral in having his friend
Khamenei named supreme leader. This was a tumultuous time. The eight-year war
with Iraq, which saw the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iranians, had just
ended, and the two men worked to rebuild the country.
It was a rare period of political unity, but it would not last. The
two men began to see the country’s future differently: Rafsanjani supported
efforts to mend relations with the West and develop Iran’s economy — positions
he espoused until his death this year. But Khamenei wanted Iran to be a
powerful force among Islamic nations, a counterweight to the Persian Gulf Arab
kingdoms. “The debate that started in the 1990s between Khamenei and Rafsanjani
still continues today,” says Syracuse’s Boroujerdi.
Rafsanjani and Khatami were key players in the regime’s most public
rift to date, when Rafsanjani called for an investigation into alleged voter
fraud that led to Ahmadinejad’s second term. Khamenei, in what was seen at the
time as a rebuke of his old friend, said that Ahmadinejad’s “views are closer
to mine” than Rafsanjani’s.
Evidence of Khamenei’s attitude lies in a constitutional provision
that allows former presidents to run for a third term after at least one out of
office. As he gets older, Khamenei and the clerical bodies that support him see
the prospect of a returning president as unacceptable. In 2013 and again this
year, two of the three former presidents, Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad, were
formally blocked from entering the race. In a meeting last August, according to
leaked reports, Khamenei told Ahmadinejad, “Your presence in the election will
polarize it, and this is not in the interest of the revolution and the people.”
Two-term presidents project the image of stability. Three-term presidents start
to look a lot like an attempt to displace Khamenei as a permanent pillar of the
nation.
At the core of Khamenei’s struggle with his presidents is the question
of the Islamic republic’s future. Will it stick to its ideological roots and
remain insular and disconnected from the world in fundamental ways? Or will it
open to international relations, increasing trade and allowing for greater
personal freedoms for its citizens? The latter is seemingly the will of Iran’s
people, who, when they turn out to vote in local and national elections, choose
moderate candidates over hard-line ones — at least three of the four presidents
who followed Khamenei prove that.
Khamenei doesn’t want to compromise on the revolution’s ideals. But
voter partisanship and even divisions among the political class suggest that he
has been unable to rekindle the revolutionary zeal.
مطالب مارا در وبلاک های انجمن نجات ایران وخط سرخ مقاومت
