Iranian Moderate Elected President in Rebuke to Conservatives
Published: June 15, 2013
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Many Iranians became disillusioned after the 2009 election, when millions took to the streets because they believed the vote had been rigged to allow Mr. Ahmadinejad to return to office. The government dispatched security forces to silence the opposition and placed the leaders of the so-called Green Movement under house arrest for years.
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The Lede is following developments in Iran, where voters went to the polls on Friday in the first presidential election since the disputed contest in 2009.
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But within the circumscribed world of Iranian politics the public looked to the latest election as a chance to push back.
When a 58-year-old woman named Fatemeh took a seat in the women’s compartment of the Tehran subway on Saturday, she did what she always did, discreetly listening to those around her.
“They were all shocked, like me,” she said. “It is unbelievable. Have the people really won?”
Beaten down by pessimism and expecting that Iran could only change for the worse, many awoke on Saturday anticipating that the conservative clerics and the members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps who have been amassing power over the past years would alter the outcome in their favor.
Instead, state television, which is under the conservatives’ control, meticulously broadcast the results that came in more slowly than usual, with all showing a clear lead for Mr. Rowhani.
“I thought they would trick us, engineer a runoff with another candidate and make Rowhani lose,” said Reyhan, 30, a poet.
Interviews with Iranians who voted on Friday suggested that they were conflicted about choosing any of the six carefully vetted candidates. But they said at least Mr. Rowhani represented a distinct change from the bombast of Mr. Ahmadinejad, who presided over a painful economic decline and increased the country’s international ostracism.
“We need to end these eight years of horror,” Mehdi, 29, said while leaving a polling station in Narmak, the Tehran neighborhood where Mr. Ahmadinejad had lived before he was elected in 2005. “I thought of not voting, but we cannot stand aside.”
“Either Rowhani wins or we leave the country,” he said as his wife nodded. On Saturday, Mr. Khatami wrote an open letter to the ayatollah seeking a reprieve for the leaders of the opposition movement, the former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi; his wife, Zahra Rahnavard; and the cleric Mehdi Karroubi, the opposition Web site Kalame reported. They have been under house arrest for years.
“This is a request by millions of reformists who played a crucial role in fulfilling the Leader’s wish and now they request the Leader to respond positively to their demand and fill their hearts with joy,” Mr. Khatami wrote in his letter, titled “Today Is the Day of Mercy.”
For the West, Mr. Rowhani’s election means a possible opportunity for at least a change in tone in the long-stalled nuclear talks.
In a way, the election was a referendum on Iran’s tactics in the talks. Mr. Rowhani was Iran’s nuclear negotiator in 2004, when Iran agreed to voluntary suspend its uranium enrichment. That suspension was reversed under Mr. Ahmadinejad, and Mr. Rowhani was replaced with Saeed Jalili, the establishment’s favorite for president and a protégé of Ayatollah Khamenei. He promised “no compromise” during the campaign and was scathing in his attacks on Mr. Rowhani, whom he suggested had betrayed the country.
In a pre-election speech, Ayatollah Khamenei also implicitly warned Mr. Rowhani that it was “wrong” to think that there could be any compromise with Western nations.
On Saturday, a member of Parliament, Sharif Husseini, said that “nothing would change” in Iran’s nuclear policies regardless of the election’s outcome.
“All these policies have been decided by the supreme leader,” he was quoted as saying by the Iranian Students’ News Agency.
But some Iranian experts in the West were not so sure.
“While the supreme leader firmly controls that file, tone matters,” said Cliff Kupchan, who follows Iran for the Eurasia Group, a political risk consulting firm in Washington. “If the U.S. and Iran get into a room this fall and our side doesn’t have to listen to a 60-minute harangue, the dynamics could be different.”
Gary G. Sick, a Columbia University scholar who specializes in Iran and served on the National Security Council during the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations, also foresaw a possible shift.
“The reality is the supreme leader may be the guy who calls all the shots, but he changes his mind; he has permitted all kinds of things to be tried,” Mr. Sick said.
Putting himself in the position of the American nuclear negotiating team, Mr. Sick, said: “What would I prefer? Would I really rather have Jalili, or Rowhani?”
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