The first round of Iran’s elections ended without a winner, leading to the need for a runoff vote to be held on July 5. The two candidates vying for the presidential seat are reformist Masoud Pezeshki and ultraconservative Seed Jalili, who received the majority of votes in the first round, with 44.36 percent and 40.35 percent, respectively.
At least three main considerations are possible after the outcome of the first round of elections in order to understand its dynamics and assess its evolving scenarios.
The first consideration that can be drawn from the first round of voting is the turnout, which on June 28 registered 39.93 percent, ranking as the lowest since the 1979 revolution. It represents a demonstration of how Iranian society is now deeply disillusioned and disenchanted with politics, which it finds incapable of solving the country’s structural problems, implementing the reforms long demanded especially by the younger generation and providing opportunities for the future. Thus, the establishment’s attempt to admit candidates from different political groups to the elections in order to boost voting and legitimize the elections before Iranian society and the international community was to no avail. Such a low voter turnout – by Iranian standards – clearly and unequivocally manifests an intent to send a strong signal, even at the risk of seeing a candidate from the ultra-conservative area elected, which could help transform Iranian politics in a further pejorative way.
Instead, the second consideration lies in the analysis of the vote, and it shows how Iranian politics has become further polarized, shifting toward its two extremes, sacrificing the centrist area and the more moderate conservative principalist area. Voters who went to the polls split their vote almost evenly between the reformist area candidate and the ultraradical area candidate, further squeezing the principalist area and inflicting a humiliating defeat on Qalibaf and Pourmohammadi. An outcome that is a product of the now nearly completed generational transition at the top of the Iranian power system, where the first revolutionary-era clerical generation is now demographically supplanted by the second generation, which has its roots in the war experience against Iraq and the Pasdaran’s powerful combination of political, economic and military power. At the same time, however, Iranian society is also composed of a third generation, demographically representative of those under the age of 35 who make up about 75 percent of the population, which is largely politically oriented toward reformist positions. The vote of a portion of these thus succeeded in the first round in offsetting the cohesive cadre of the ultraconservative electorate, which has nevertheless shown that it has grown again and now has the capacity – as demonstrated in the parliamentary elections last March 1 – to challenge and prevail over the principalist components, which until a few years ago represented the majority group in the conservative system.
The third consideration relates instead to the prospects for the runoff on July 5, where once again turnout will determine the prospects of victory for the two admitted candidates. If Iranian society still manifests as it did in the first round of the elections its disinterest in politics, insisting on sending a clear message to the establishment through abstaining from voting, victory will in all likelihood be achieved by the ultraconservative candidate Jalili, who will thus be able to count on his own solid voting base and in all likelihood also that of a part of the principalist electorate. If, on the contrary, the prospect of a new radical government will induce society to eradicate this risk through vote, Pezeshkian’s chances of winning the election would increase significantly.
The main driving factor toward abstention, however, lies in the disillusionment especially with regard to the capabilities of the presidential figure, after the failed experiments of Khatami’s reformism and Rohani’s pragmatism, which have engendered a widespread feeling of powerlessness both vis-à-vis the power establishment and the international community, which has never really allowed progressive area groups to consolidate their role by dragging them into ruinous failures. This same disillusionment, moreover, also explains the increased popularity of the ultra-radical groups, which, while not advocating any social reform agenda, are characterized by a clear rejection of any further compromise with the Western world, opening up on the contrary to Russia, China and the global south in the view of a new agenda of autonomy, capable of appealing to the nationalist sentiments of a probably minoritarian but certainly significant part of the population.
