Iran's Reformists Enter the Bargaining Stage of Grief

Iranian reformists face an uncertain future as they desperately try to find a presidential candidate that has any chance of winning.

Then-reformist parliamentary leader Mohammad Reza Aref in a meeting in December 2016.

The reformists in Iran have a problem.

The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, more commonly known as just the Iran nuclear deal, lays dead on the floor, waiting to be reanimated by someone who knows how. Just a few years ago, its signing had been the validation the movement had been waiting for for years, if not decades. It proved, that despite the insistence of the conservatives in government, diplomacy with America was possible without the total and complete sacrifice of Iran’s nuclear policy, of its foreign policy objectives, or of its governmental system.

Iranians were jubilant, taking to the streets the night of of the agreement to celebrate. The negotiators of the deal were met with a welcome home fit for a hero, with ecstatic crowds of thousands swarming to meet the people who secured what was said couldn’t be done. Global corporations streamed into Iran to invest, salvaging a national economy that had been suffering immensely and giving the country the largest GDP growth rate in more than 10 years. The positive press of the Rouhani administration was inescapable. It seemed like everything was finally going right.

The years since have not been kind.

The stalwart symbol of the victory of the reformist vision had all but exploded. A moment that had been so hard-fought, its groundwork having been laid by years of attempts by the Khatami administration to open up a “Dialogue Among Civilizations”, biding their time amidst the diplomatic rollbacks of the Ahmadinejad presidency, and then finally threading the needle, only to have it all evaporate within 12 minutes. It had all been for nothing.

As public opinion slowly but surely turned against the deal as it became clear the renewed crippling sanctions were not going away, the reformists still continued to support the JCPOA at all costs. Their rhetoric about the potential of the United States reentering the deal remained almost unchanged, even as relations with America deteriorated further and further away, even after the IRGC was designated a terrorist organization and Qassem Soleimani was assassinated. The reformists were still hopeful that the next administration would reenter the deal, and everything would return to normal. But with the public, things had been irreparably changed.

Despite the barely contained glee of some in the Rouhani administration at Biden’s victory and the possibility of the nuclear deal’s revival, many Iranians had already made up their mind. A bare majority of Iranians still favored the JCPOA, but it had sunk from the overwhelming heights of two-thirds the population that backed it five years earlier. Instead, nearly two-thirds of Iranians now agreed with this statement as polled by the University of Maryland:

“The JCPOA experience shows that it is not worthwhile for Iran to make concessions, because Iran cannot have confidence that if it makes a concession world powers will honor their side of an agreement.”

Iranians still by-and-large backed diplomacy, but the philosophy of “diplomacy for diplomacy’s sake”, as railed against by presidential candidates like Hossein Dehghan, was no longer in vogue. Iranians now wanted checks and balances to ensure American compliance, for Iran to give up fewer things in any future agreement, and most importantly, for America to make the first move.

Diplomacy wasn’t the only reason many Iranians had lost faith in the reformist movement. President Rouhani had taken a rightward shift during his second term after the Iran deal was torn up in a bid to abate conservative criticism of the administration. Many reformists were afraid to publicly break with Rouhani as many conservatives had done with Ahmadinejad before him, as there would be no backers in government to fall back on, and making the president weaker would only embolden said opponents. Protests against perceived mass government corruption and inaction toward the flailing economy grew increasingly intense, culminating in November 2019, when the largest protests in over a decade drew a deadly military response that killed hundreds.

In the aftermath, many reformists could take it no longer, and made speeches in parliament railing against the violent government response and calling it an atrocity. The response by the Guardian Council was to disqualify the reformist coalition nearly out of parliament, reducing the largest group of parliamentarians from 121 to 20 by the next election.

Reformists had been disqualified out of parliament before. 2004, 2008, 2012, all had seen reformist parliamentary candidates mass disqualified, oftentimes in response to the threat of either a victory for them there or for the presidency. But by now, the feeling of hopelessness among reformist voters had reached a breaking point. A near-majority of Iranians now backed neither the reformists nor the conservative factions.

Every time the reformists had attempted to change things in Iran, they had seen their actions rolled back by the next administration, and oftentimes during the administration itself. Those who opposed the actions of the conservative establishment, of Supreme Leader Khamenei himself, were punished with house arrest without charge and cut off from much of the outside world, like Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, or having their words banned from being reported on for years at a time, like President Mohammad Khatami.

Attempts to change the system were rolled back. Those who tried to take on the system were arrested. Not even extensive compromise and setting aside their own shot at the presidency again, trying to jump through every hoop perfectly to achieve a diplomatic agreement, only lasted for two years. And amidst all of this, the reformists had by-and-large kept to their original political philosophy, keeping on their same goals and hoping for an eventual victory sometime in the future.

There was an inescapable feeling of running in circles, wherein the reformist movement wasn’t just constantly prevented from getting anything done by powers they could not question, but were themselves unwilling to change their strategy, to try anything different.

This tanking of popular support of the administration they backed and of their own faction had left the reformists going into the 2021 presidential election with a significant problem. The movement was already strapped for candidates from 2013 on, but what had been seen as their meal ticket going into this election was now in deep turmoil.

Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri speaking at one of the 2017 presidential debates.

Eshaq Jahangiri, the First Vice President under Rouhani, had done a bizarre gambit during the 2017 election. He ostensibly ran against his own president, yet spent all of his time defending the administration’s record. He was essentially acting as a second Rouhani to attack conservative critics, only dropping out a few days before the election. It was widely seen a move to raise his own profile before running in 2021, to continue the policies of the administration he had served in that at the time was incredibly popular.

Now, that run was in jeopardy. Despite Jahangiri still to this very day remaining on that same track, that the Rouhani administration had done more for Iran than almost any administration before it, that didn’t ring true to most Iranians anymore. The reformists as always had a slate of people to run that could potentially pass the Guardian Council, not just Jahangiri, but many of them were little-known to Iranians, a not-insurmountable problem to reach the presidency, but for a faction that had already seen its popularity sink so low, was not ideal by any means.

In an interview in February with Khabar Online, former Vice President Hossein Marashi and spokesman of the Executives of Construction Party, one of the primary reformist political parties, laid it out simply.

“In my opinion, the first choice of the reformists will be Mr. Zarif.”

At the time of this interview, there were already reformist candidates announced, like Mostafa Kavakebian, and others had been in the process of finalizing announcements, like Mohammad-Ali Afshani. Marashi seemed to dismiss the possibilities of them all though.

When talking about Eshaq Jahangiri? “The reformists do not ask him [to run].” When talking about Mohammad Reza Aref, the former parliamentary leader of the reformists, Marashi is no more certain. He talks about “if the party makes a collective decision” to back him, they will back him, speaking as if Aref is a last-resort, backup candidate. When talking about Zarif, there is no such uncertainty. Marashi makes every excuse for him, talking about Zarif being as accepted a reformist as other full-throated reformists like Khatami or Aref are. The issue: Zarif isn’t a reformist. Never has been.

Zarif has always been an independent. Someone who had obviously been at the forefront of diplomacy and rapprochement with the United States, yes, but someone who had served in the administrations of Khatami, Ahmadinejad, as well as Rouhani, spanning all parts of the Iranian political spectrum. But Marashi was firm in his reasonings.

Iran’s reformists have compromised before. When Rouhani was running for reelection, he was so popular at the time that the reformists didn’t want to potentially rock the boat by running someone against him. In 2013, Aref ran as the reformist candidate but dropped out just a few days before the election, hoping that a reformist coalition with the new moderate president could bring about the change they wanted. In 2021, the reformists are starting from the compromise position already, with that compromise position being their first and most enthusiastic choice.

Zarif, despite being by far the most outspoken member of the Rouhani administration, had managed to escape his president’s downfall from grace mostly unscathed, for the most part by cultivating his own persona separate from the president. Rouhani’s associates like Jahangiri, who had bet their horse entirely on supporting Rouhani throughout everything, were not as lucky. The polling was clear from month to month, none of the potential reformist candidates were even close to getting anywhere.

Aref, the most recent presidential candidate the reformist movement had united behind in any real capacity back in 2013, had an approval rating of only 22%. The most popular reformist figure in Iran, former president Khatami, only clocked in at 44%, and he had already said last year that he wouldn’t run. Zarif was the only other option, someone whose diplomatic viewpoint, at the very least, lined up with the reformists, and despite his high approval ratings, only 5% of Iranians said they would vote for him in a presidential election. Not only that, despite the speculation of some, Zarif has spent more time than anyone else denying that he would ever run for president.

The reformists are now facing down the barrel of something people have written about and predicted for years, that the reformists would eventually reach the end of their rope, and when faced with their vision of Iranian path forward shattered again and again, would not be able to muster up any way to change it. The movement is now no longer considering any of its actual politicians as figureheads, desperately looking outward for others more popular than them to join them on the sinking ship, in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, they’ll be able to bring them out from the depths before it’s too late.

Mehran Kamrava, a professor at Georgetown University Qatar, has talked often about the “pendulum” of Iranian politics, how it has always swung from reformists to conservatives, whether it be in the parliament or the presidency. But the reformists have not been in existence forever, and they can just as easily dissipate when their base no longer sees any use for them.

The trend from 2009 on spells a picture of an increasing narrowness of Iran’s political scene, where the breadth of acceptable opinions to express and to vote for lurches further right, in a scene already made up entirely of different varieties of right-wing religious conservatives. The pendulum of power has swung from the reformists to the conservatives in 2005, and from the conservatives to the moderates in 2013. Many observers have consigned themselves to a conservative victory in 2021, if not by a lack of effective opposition to the conservatives, then by forcible disqualification. The question isn’t even about 2021 at a certain point, it’s about 2025. What will remain of the reformist movement then? Who will fill the void for disaffected reformist voters if and when that time comes?

If the pendulum does exist, and it is always swinging, what will it swing back to?