Ebrahim Raisi’s victory bodes ill for any hope of liberalisation in Iran. The Islamic republic looks ever more like an Islamic autocracy
“THE HEART of elections is competition—if you take that away it becomes a corpse,” said Hassan Rouhani, the president of Iran, last month. To many Iranian voters, though, the presidential election on June 18th was more like a joke. In the days before the vote, some posted images on social media of Ebrahim Raisi, the eventual winner, debating not other candidates, but himself. Others shared a clip from “The Dictator”, a film in which Sacha Baron Cohen plays a Middle Eastern despot.
Another hardliner, Mohsen Rezaei, a former head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corp , scored 12% and Abdolnasser Hemmati, a former governor of the central bank, on whom some Iranians settled as a protest candidate, 8%. How Mr Raisi is viewed in America matters. Iran has been hit hard by covid-19. Its economy has suffered as a result of the virus, but also because of graft, mismanagement and, most of all, sanctions reimposed by Donald Trump after he yanked America out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. That is the unwieldy name given to the multinational deal under which Iran agreed to curb its nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief.
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