Javad Zarif, the former foreign minister and probably the Iranian politician best known to the west, has thrown himself into the campaign to elect the reformist Masoud Pezeshkian as the country’s president.
Zarif emerged from academia back to frontline politics to face heckling at public rallies, outright bans from one university and allegations that he is seeking to settle scores with those who thwarted his foreign policy when in office between 2013 and 2021.
At moments, Zarif’s fiery tongue, and his determination to defend the signing of the 2015 nuclear deal, has threatened to dominate the brief campaign, leaving the mild-mannered and consensual candidate, a heart surgeon and long-serving MP, in the shadows.
The regime itself is torn. It is desperate for interest to be generated in the election to boost the regime’s legitimacy but also keen to prevent the country’s divisions from spiralling out of control.
Realising that Pezeshkian – if only because he appears uncorrupt – has a chance of winning, the five conservative candidates are under growing pressure to end the split in their votes and rally round one nominee.
According to Sina Toossi, a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy in the US, three candidates including Pezeshkian have a credible path to victory. If he were allowed to win, the shock would come at a critical moment for Iran. It is facing pressure over its support for the so-called axis of resistance against Israel, the arming of Russia in Ukraine and growing doubts that Iran will abide by its commitment not to build a nuclear bomb.
While it is unclear if Zarif would leave academia and return to public office if the reformists won, his presence, according to Toossi, has helped “a centrepiece of the campaign unexpectedly to become a debate about the merits of negotiations, the nuclear deal, improving balanced ties with the world, self-reliance, reducing tensions. All these bipolarities have emerged again.”
In recent days, Zarif has become used to dealing with hecklers from the opposition camps. “This is the difference between us and you. We are the majority of this society and we don’t allow a loud and talkative minority to think of itself as the majority,” he shouted at disrupters on Sunday.
The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei – to whom the new president will ultimately answer – has already ordered the candidates to cool their rhetoric, while the vice-president, Mohammad Hosseini, demanded an end to the criticism of the previous president, Ebrahim Raisi, whose death in a helicopter crash prompted the election.
As Iran’s foreign minister for eight years under the centrist president Hassan Rouhani and lead negotiator in the nuclear deal, Zarif personifies the controversy in the campaign – about whether to cooperate with the west as well as the east, including cooperation to end western sanctions.
In a stormy eight-minute speech on television, Zarif accused the three-year Raisi regime of causing a tightening of western sanctions on Iran, and by passing hostile legislation throwing away a golden chance to revive the deal under Joe Biden in 2020. He later said his speech proved to have been the equivalent of “pouring water into an ant’s nest”.
Although Zarif is more combative than Pezeshkian, they both argue that careful compromise with the west is not a humiliation but normal for independent nations. “Is it good to negotiate and return empty-handed? Is it good to shout slogans and empty people’s pockets?”
But Afshin Shahi, Middle East politics professor at Keele University, warned that “Zarif is a very polarising figure.”
“Even though he believes in the fundamental ideology of the Islamic Republic, he had a communication strategy towards the west no other Iranian politician had followed since 1979. Immediately after the nuclear deal, he became very popular with the Iranian middle class, but distrusted by hardliners due to his closeness to figures including the [former US secretary of state] John Kerry. But his popularity faded when Rouhani was unable to deliver for over eight years.
“The slogans during the ‘woman, life, freedom’ movement protests showed the old binary divisions between reformists and conservatives that had been so effective in driving millions of voters to the polls no longer apply. The presence of Zarif may help the turnout a little, and persuade some to give reformism a last chance, but it would be very surprising if it changes much.”
In particular, Zarif’s indifference to political prisoners, and his past advocacy of the hijab in public, contrasts with Pezeskhian’s repeated promises to relax the enforcement of the hijab and bring in internet freedom and free speech at universities.
It is also striking that Pezeshkian’s campaign spokesperson, Hamideh Zarabadi, is a woman. Nevertheless, crowds at reformist rallies, although growing, are male and hardly youthful.
Zarif seems reconciled to the vitriol. “Those who curse me in one way when the reformist wins, curse me in another way when he doesn’t win. On polling day, if the reformist did not win I am comfortable in front of my conscience and history that I did the best I could.”
Although some key reformists have urged voters to go to the polls, such as Mohammad Reza Khatami who has said he would vote for Pezeshkian, others including many jailed human rights activists, such as Narges Mohammadi, have urged a boycott.
The reformists claim to be slightly ahead in four-fifths of the published polls, and on an upward trend, but their hopes of winning more than 50% of those voting and avoiding a second round are contingent on turnout and the two leading conservative candidates, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf and Saeed Jalili, failing to agree that one of them will step down. Both camps are pressing the other to do so, but fundamental ideological difficulties may prevent a deal.
