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The Iranian people will be the losers in this election no matter which candidate wins because their votes don’t matter, according to a senior fellow at a US-based think tank.
Behnam Bentaleb of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies said the outcome of the presidential race after Friday’s vote is in many ways a foregone conclusion.
“Iran has only one important voter…and that is the Supreme Leader,” he said, referring to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“So you can tell who will win, among the candidates you mentioned…the Iranian people will definitely lose,” he said in an interview with CNBC’s “Capital Connection” on Friday.
An Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman was not immediately available for comment when contacted by CNBC.
Bentalelu referred to anti-government protests in recent years, with demonstrators calling on their leaders to resign. They “did not seek reform, as in past years – but they do seek revolution,” he said.
“stagnation factor”
Bentalelu added that the frontrunner in the presidential race, Ibrahim Raisi, is “certainly a factor of stagnation, not change.”
He said political analysts are putting forward the name of the hard-line judge Raisi as a possible alternative to Khamenei in the future. Raisi, if elected, would be the first serving Iranian president in recent memory to be punished by Washington before taking office—sanctions imposed on him for his participation in the mass execution of political prisoners in 1988.
“You will probably see the Islamic Republic maintaining its aggression abroad and repression at home, with my president at its head,” he said.
Polls opened at 7 a.m. local time on Friday for Iran’s elections, and political experts noted that apathy was spreading across the country.
Iranian voters cast their ballots at the Hussainiya Ershad mosque in Rey city in the thirteenth Iranian presidential election, in Tehran, Iran on June 18, 2021.
Fatima Bahrami | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
Rather than looking at who would win the election, Bentaleb said future US policy should be based on voter turnout, which is expected to be very low.
“It is not about who holds the presidency of the Islamic Republic… It is about what the Iranian people refer to towards their state,” he said. “In the past few years, the gulf between state and society could not have widened.”
Voter turnout is one way to determine whether the Iranian people support their leaders, and “should make their way into” American politics.
nuclear deal
Bentaleb also said there may be a return to the 2015 nuclear deal after the elections, but before the inauguration of the new president.
“It is very important to note that even some hard-line candidates would like to keep talking,” he said.
“Even though they are attacking the (current) Rouhani government and undermining the nuclear deal, they want to because in the end…the Iranian economy is hurting,” he said.
He said it was “quite possible” that the JCPOA could be rolled back during the “lame duck period” of Hassan Rouhani’s government.
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