The Foreign Service Journal - October 2017

24 OCTOBER 2017 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL difficult to determine who “wins” in a legislative or municipal election. But these lists are the closest one can come to an ideo- logical definition of the political structure in Iran. In the 2017 election, 73 percent of the 56 million eligible vot- ers cast a ballot, and 57 percent of the voters (23 million people) voted for the incumbent president, Hassan Rouhani. His victory continued several Iranian traditions—first, granting the incum- bent a second term. Every president elected since the constitu- tion was changed to a presidential system in 1989 has also been re-elected. It also renewed another tradition, which usually goes unnoticed: Given a very limited choice of candidates, the Iranian body politic consistently votes for the man they believe is most committed to reform of the existing system. President Rouhani is a veteran of the Islamic Republic, and has been an insider from the beginning. But he has also become much more reform- minded as he has campaigned and ruled. A Leader Who Is Not So Supreme A third tradition, which seems to be repeating itself in the present cycle, is the propensity of the Supreme Leader to begin undercutting the authority of the elected president almost as soon as he begins his second term. This tendency is not hard to explain. Ever since the election of President Mohammad Khatami in 1997, presidents, who must actually appeal to the electorate directly and who are held accountable for policies that affect people in their daily lives, tend to become increasingly reformist during their campaigns and in their first term. They come into their second term with an agenda and a mandate, and that is perceived as threatening by the Supreme Leader, who is, in fact, less “supreme” than his title would suggest. The occupant of this unique political position is chosen, essen- tially for life, by a group of hand-picked senior officials. As the heir of Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, the Supreme Leader is responsible for preserving the revolution- ary elements of the Iranian system. Moreover, although he is primus inter pares within the leadership, he is in fact mainly an arbiter among the various institutions competing for power: the president, the legislature, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, and the very conservative judiciary and intelligence ministries. Typically, the Supreme Leader wants a heavy voting turnout and even a second term for the president, since that is evidence of popular support for a stable Islamic Republic. But too much popular support for a reformist president is a threat to the Supreme Leader and his institutional imperative. The military, conservative judiciary and intelligence agencies, on whom the Leader depends for his personal and institutional security, are also suspicious of toomuch power gravitating to the presidency and its supporters. To them, reformmeans an evolution away from the revolutionary Islamic nature of the system. They often wait impatiently for the election to play itself out and then reassert their own authority, as if to remind everyone that they have not gone away. The tension between these two camps defines the structure of what some regard as a contradiction in terms: a revolutionary Islamic republic. (The origins, strategies and deficiencies of the Iranian reformmovement are brilliantly portrayed in Laura Secor’s book, Children of Paradise .) TASNIMNEWSAGENCY [CCBY4.0]/WIKIMEDIACOMMONS A crowd watches one of the three live, televised debates held during the 2017 presidential election.