Iran’s election features a reformer, a hardliner and a crisis

Reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian drew 43% of the vote in the first round against 39% for conservative Saeed Jalili, setting the stage for Friday’s runoff to succeed President Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash in May. Around 60% of Iran’s voters stayed away in the first round, disillusioned that their choice would make a meaningful difference.

The winner will inherit a dire legacy.

The regime has confounded decades of U.S. pressure by aligning itself with Russia and China and building alliances with regional militias, increasing its power to influence events throughout the Middle East and beyond. 

But at home, the new president will grapple with an economy left in tatters by years of U.S. sanctions and domestic mismanagement. Annual inflation has been running around 40% in recent years, with much of the population living in poverty.

Iranians have repeatedly taken to the streets as conditions worsened—over economic hardship in 2017, in response to higher fuel prices in 2019 and over restrictive social rules in 2022.

“Whoever gets the presidency will have to convince the establishment of putting the economy as the No. 1 priority," said Roozbeh Aliabadi, an Iran expert and advisory board member at U.S. consulting firm Global Growth Advisors. “The system as a whole is not trusted, making protests and turmoil…the new normal in the months or years to come."

Iran’s theocratic rulers must approve all candidates, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has the final say on policy. A win by the hard-liner could signal a more aggressive foreign policy and nuclear posture, while a win by the reformist could point to more flexibility, said Sina Toossi, an Iran expert at the Center for International Policy, a Washington think tank.

Amid the tight control, the government tolerates a degree of competitive campaigning and voting in hopes of appearing responsive and keeping disgruntled citizens from dropping out of the system.

The two final candidates have been unusually outspoken by Iran’s standards.

In televised debates this week, they have largely positioned their candidacies around two pivotal moments in recent Iranian history: the 2015 pact that traded curbs on its nuclear program for sanctions relief until it was scrapped by the U.S., and the 2022 nationwide protests triggered by the death of a young woman in police custody who was accused of violating the Islamic Republic’s strict dress code.

A 69-year-old surgeon, Pezeshkian pitches himself as a unifying, empathetic figure who lost his wife and a child in a car accident. He was a health minister under reformist President Mohammad Khatami, whose attempts to liberalize elections were blocked by hard-liners during his tenure between 1997 and 2005. He has said that he wants to relax Iran’s strict Islamic dress code for women.

This week, he said he would stand against curbs on Internet use and the power of the morality police, who force women to cover their hair or face arrest. He has also vowed to work to restore the nuclear deal to lift the sanctions that have crippled the country’s economy, and during the campaign even played a pro-democracy anthem that had become a rallying cry for the 2022 demonstrators.

“We should stand up again and draw new plans," he said in a video, “and for the sake of our Iran strive to save our country from poverty, lies, discrimination and injustice."

His reformist approach won the vote in areas that were strongholds of the protest movement—the capital, Tehran, and peripheral regions populated by minorities.

Still, Pezeshkian has carefully avoided crossing the government’s red lines. He hasn’t called for an end to the compulsory veil and has turned up at rallies with his hijab-wearing daughter.

Protests in Iran are greeted with harsh violence and dissenters are often jailed or in some cases executed. During the campaign, Pezeshkian complained that his references to the 2022 protests had been censored by state media.

Abbas, a 40-year-old accountant in Tehran, said Pezeshkian’s pledge to engage with the West could help revitalize Iran’s struggling economy, but said that wasn’t enough to convince him to vote.

“I think they choose whoever they like," he said of Iran’s rulers. “All of them, it’s the same dish, just with a different sauce."

Jalili, 58, was born in the holy Muslim Shia city of Mashhad and is backed by a faction known as “super revolutionaries" that seeks a return to the firebrand spirit of the regime’s early days.

He is a former member of the hard-line Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, lost a leg during Iran’s 1980s war with Iraq and now is an adviser to Khamenei. He advocates stricter penalties against women who don’t properly cover their hair, saying the rules play a central role to “preserve and strengthen the sanctity of the institution of family."​​​​​​​

Jalili has slammed the 2015 nuclear deal, wants to expand trade with Russia and has vowed to fight restrictions on the economy.

“We must make the other party regret imposing sanctions on us economically and make it costly for them to do so," he said Tuesday.

As the top nuclear negotiator from 2007 to 2013, Jalili gained a reputation for his obstructive approach to nuclear talks with global powers that contributed to unprecedented sanctions on Iran in 2012. William Burns, then a State Department official and now the chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, wrote in a memoir that Jalili slowed the nuclear talks with digressions on Iran’s culture and history as a way to remain “opaque when he wanted to avoid straight answers."

Such an approach resonates with conservative Iranians who feel Iran was shortchanged in talks with the West. “He will not wait for the lifting of sanctions to get economic growth," said Hossein Ansari Pour, 45, an Iranian translator who plans to vote for Jalili. “Who says reconciliation with the West is the only way out for Iran?"

Jalili’s rigid ideological posture has drawn opponents to liken him to the Taliban, the hard-line faction that runs Afghanistan. But it also drew the most votes in the conservative heartlands of central Iran. He was booed this week during a visit to Tehran’s bazaar, showing he has failed to convince many in the business community that his plans to bypass sanctions could work.

In one televised debate, Pezeshkian took a swipe at his rival by offering to withdraw if the latter could guarantee a booming economy. But, the reformist added: “If he fails, he should be executed."

Jalili later retorted: “You sentence me to death, but you say we are Taliban."

The bickering may not be enough to bring back disengaged Iranians to the ballot box. The 40% of the electorate that voted in the first round marked the country’s lowest participation rate in a presidential election. Boycotting elections has become the unspoken way Iranians express their rejection of the system.

In a video published by state TV, Supreme Leader Khamenei admitted that participation had been lower than expected but rejected the assumption that those who didn’t vote in the first round were against the system. Pezeshkian, in a message on X, blamed the conservative camp for the lack of engagement among Iranian voters.

“We were shocked," Ansari Pour, the translator who plans to vote for Jalili, said of the low participation rate. But he said the polarization between the reformist and conservative camps meant more voters were now planning to turn out for the runoff to make sure the other side doesn’t win.

Many voters are still likely to stay away.

Only 45% of eligible voters intend to cast their ballot with 49.5% favoring Pezeshkian, 43.9% for Jalili and the rest undecided on who to vote for, according to a poll by the government-connected Iranian Students Polling Agency released Thursday.

“This is a clear sign of the increased perceived illegitimacy or inefficacy of the Islamic Republic in the eyes of a majority of its citizens," said Farzan Sabet, an Iran-focused senior research associate at the Geneva Graduate Institute, an international-affairs focused Swiss university. “We can expect a continuation of the cycle of mass demonstrations."

Write to Benoit Faucon at benoit.faucon@wsj.com