Khamenei has relied on loyalists in the Guardian Council to manipulate the candidate field to ensure that no official with the potential to challenge him and the course he has charted for the Islamic Republic can come to power through elections. Rouhani, while purporting to break with the anti-Western extremism of his predecessor, Ahmadinejad, stayed true to his roots as a conservative cleric committed to the revolutionary system of government. The cleric was permitted to stand for election twice because of this loyalty.

When presidential elections were held in June 2021, scores of eligible voters again boycotted, either because they saw that the Guardian Council had intervened to sway the election in favor of the far-right conservative Judiciary Chief Ebrahim Raisi or because they were disillusioned over the prospects for reform after eight years of Rouhani.

On the campaign trail in 2013, Hassan Rouhani advocated for a less confrontational approach to the West, leading some Western media outlets to hail him as a harbinger of moderation in the Islamic Republic.

After the Guardian Council blocked Khatami’s legislative agenda and intervened to ensure hardliner domination in the 2003 and 2004 municipal and parliamentary elections, it appeared the government and populace were on a more conservative trajectory. However, the reality was somewhat more nuanced when it came to the public. Prosperity and living standards rose in general during the Khatami Administration, although the poor and working classes were largely left behind.

The 1997 Presidential Elections

While the reform movement’s fortunes have risen and fallen over the past two decades, the May 1997 presidential election was a major show of strength and a wake-up call to the conservative hardliners that their rigidity and repression were deeply unpopular. In September 1996, one of Rafsanjani’s deputy presidents proposed that the constitution be amended to allow him to run for a third consecutive term.

Former majles speaker Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was elected to the newly empowered presidency on July 28, 1989, in a non-competitive election, amassing nearly 95 percent of the vote after the Guardian Council allowed only two of 79 applicants to stand for election.

Throughout Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s tenure as Supreme Leader, his central preoccupations have been amassing more power, ensuring the continuity of Iran’s revolutionary regime, and gaining the upper hand for his hardline conservative ideology in the factional disputes over the Islamic Republic’s trajectory. Khamenei himself has proven a nimble autocrat adept at navigating the vicissitudes of Iran’s dynamic political terrain.

Khamenei understood that true longevity in the position would require more than trying to cloak himself in his predecessor’s aura. Khamenei would eventually need to be seen as a legitimate religious authority and source of emulation in his own right, capable of issuing decrees that would carry weight with the Shi’a faithful. When he assumed the Supreme Leadership, Khamenei was politically precarious. However, the powers afforded him by dint of his position helped him quickly establish patronage links that gave him a base and networks of support.

Khamenei recognized the need to tread cautiously when he first assumed power, and he assured the political and clerical elites who loyally served Khomeini that they would retain their positions and status.