Even as Americans are inundated by news about the seemingly never-ending contest between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, several other elections occurred last week.
In the United Kingdom, the Labour Party beat the Tories and captured the reins of government after a 14-year stretch as the opposition. In France, President Emmanuel Macron was given a slight reprieve after his party and a coalition of leftists teamed up to prevent Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally from controlling the French National Assembly.
But it was in Iran, a country not associated with free and fair democratic procedures, where the most interesting election took place by delivering the most surprising result. A little known reformist lawmaker, Masoud Pezeshkian, defeated a pillar of the conservative Iranian political establishment by a whopping 3 million votes. What many assumed would be another highly controlled election in which the conservative candidate would sail to victory instead turned out to be a blunt rejection of the system, writ large. Confronted with a choice between Saeed Jalili, an ultra-conservative hardliner known for his theological diatribes, or a lawmaker campaigning on loosening social restrictions and exploring an opening to the West, more than 16 million Iranian voters chose the latter.
Not much is known about Pezeshkian or his policies. A heart surgeon, a health minister under former reformist President Mohammad Khatami and a lawmaker for nearly 20 years, Pezeshkian pursued the office facing steep odds. Indeed, he has firsthand knowledge about how difficult it is to break into Iran’s national political scene; in 2021, he was disqualified from running for president by the guardian council, an unelected panel of jurists, clerics and officials appointed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to ensure candidates are firm believers in the Islamic Republic. That presidential contest was a stage-managed affair, with the field cleared for Ebrahim Raisi, Khamenei’s loyal protege, to assume the presidency.
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