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Domestic affairs and internal reform
Presidential term of Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani: reconstruction and liberalization
Change began in short order, when the Assembly of Experts appointed Pres. Ali Khamenei rahbar following the death of Khomeini in June 1989. The following month elections were held to select Khamenei’s replacement as president. Running virtually unopposed, Hojatoleslām Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, speaker of the Majles since 1980, was elected by an overwhelming vote. Rafsanjani, whose cabinet choices represented the various factions, immediately began the process of rebuilding the war-torn economy. Considered a pragmatist and one of the most powerful men in Iran, Rafsanjani favored a policy of economic liberalization, privatization of industry, and rapprochement with the West that would encourage much-needed foreign investment. The new president’s policies were opposed by both Khamenei and the conservative parliament, and attempts by conservative elements to stifle reforms by harassing and imprisoning political dissidents frequently resulted in demonstrations and violent protest, which were often brutally suppressed.
In this new political atmosphere, advocates of women’s rights joined with filmmakers who continued to address the gender inequities of the Islamic republic. New forms of communication, including satellite dishes and the Internet, created for Iranians access to Western media and exile groups abroad, who in turn helped broadcast dissident voices from within Iran. International campaigns for human rights, women’s rights, and a nascent democratic civil society in Iran began to take root.
Inside Iran in the mid-1990s, Abdolkarim Soroush, a philosopher with both secular and religious training, attracted thousands of followers to his lectures. Soroush advocated a type of reformist Islam that went beyond most liberal Muslim thinkers of the 20th century and argued that the search for reconciliation of Islam and democracy was not a matter of simply finding appropriate phrases in the Qurʾān that were in agreement with modern science, democracy, or human rights. Drawing on the works of Immanuel Kant, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Popper, and Erich Fromm, Soroush called for a reexamination of all tenets of Islam, insisting on the need to maintain the religion’s original spirit of social justice and its emphasis on caring for other people.
First presidential term of Mohammad Khatami: reformist movement and conservative intervention
The May 1997 election of Mohammad Khatami, a supporter of Soroush, as president was a surprise for conservatives who had backed Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri, speaker of Iran’s Majles. Shortly before the elections, the Council of Guardians had placed Khatami on a list of four acceptable candidates in order to give a greater semblance of democracy to the process. Khatami had been Iran’s minister of culture and Islamic guidance but was forced to resign in 1992 for having adopted a more moderate view on social and cultural issues. He campaigned for president on a platform of curbing censorship, fighting religious excess, and allowing for greater tolerance and was embraced by much of the public, receiving more than two-thirds of the vote and enjoying especially strong support among women and young adults.
The election of Khatami, and his appointment of a more moderate cabinet, unleashed a wave of euphoria among reformers. In less than a year some 900 new newspapers and journals received authorization to publish and added their voices to earlier reformist journals such as Zanān and Kiyān, which had been the strongest backers of Khatami. However, the limits of the reformist president’s authority became clear in the months after his election. The rahbar, Ayatollah Khamenei, continued to exercise sweeping executive powers, which he did not hesitate to use to thwart Khatami’s reforms. In June 1998 the parliament removed Khatami’s liberal interior minister, Abdullah Nouri, in a vote of no confidence, and Tehrān’s mayor, Gholamhussein Karbaschi, was convicted of corruption and jailed by the president’s conservative opponents despite strong public opinion in his favor. Reformist newspapers were accused of offending Islamic principles and shut down one by one, and six prominent intellectuals, including secular nationalist leader Dariyush Farouhar and his wife, Parvaneh Eskandari, were assassinated. Their murders were traced to agents of the Iranian intelligence services, whose representatives claimed that the assassins were acting without orders.
In the February 1999 elections for roughly 200,000 seats on village, town, and city councils, reformers once again won by an overwhelming margin, and many women were elected to office in rural areas. The antidemocratic nature of the office of rahbar was vigorously debated, and calls for its removal from the constitution now began to appear in the press. In July 1999 students protested the closing of the Salām newspaper and opposed further restrictions on the press; and police, backed by a vigilante group known as Anṣār-e Ḥezbollāh, attacked a dormitory at Tehrān University. Four students were reported killed, and hundreds more were injured or detained. On the day after the attack, 25,000 students staged a sit-in at the university and demanded the resignation of Tehrān’s police chief, whom they held responsible for the raid. Within 48 hours, demonstrations had erupted in at least 18 major cities, including Gīlān, Mashhad, and Tabrīz in the north and Yazd, Eṣfahān, and Shīrāz in the south. The demonstrators demanded that the murderers of the Farouhars and other intellectuals be brought to swift justice. They also called for freedom of the press, an increase in personal liberty, an end to the vigilante attacks on universities, and the release of 13 Iranian Jews who had been arrested by the government on allegations that they were spying for Israel. This was the first major student demonstration since the 1979 revolution, and it lasted for five days. By mid-July the government had quelled the protests, and hundreds more were arrested.
Janet AfarySecond presidential term of Mohammad Khatami: continued intervention
In 2001 President Khatami was reelected by an overwhelming majority. Although his victory was considered an expression of support for his programs of reform, at the beginning of his second term there was less popular confidence in his ability to bring about swift and dramatic political change. Attempts by the judiciary to curb pro-reform elements accelerated after Khatami’s reelection, including arrests and acts of public censure. In November 2002 Hashem Aghajari, a prominent reform-minded academic, was sentenced to death by a court in western Iran following a speech he made in support of religious reform, sparking the largest student protests since those of 1999. Aghajari’s death sentence was subsequently reduced, reinstated, and reduced again before he was released on bail in August 2004.
In the month before the Majles elections scheduled for February 2004, the Council of Guardians announced that almost half the candidates in a pool of some 8,000, including many reformists, would be disqualified from participating in the coming elections. The decision—which entailed a ban on some 80 sitting members of the Majles, including President Khatami’s brother—sparked a political crisis, and Khatami himself was among those who subsequently threatened to resign if the ban were not lifted. Following direct intervention by Ayatollah Khamenei, the council reinstated some of the candidates; nevertheless, the conservatives, as expected, emerged victorious in the elections, replacing the more centrist outgoing cabinet.
First presidential term of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: conservatives return to power
In January 2005, elections to select Khatami’s successor were set for June of that year. In May more than 1,000 presidential candidates were disqualified by the Council of Guardians from standing in the elections. In the first round of balloting, none of the seven candidates who finally participated surpassed the necessary 50 percent threshold to win outright, and a runoff was held the following week between former president Hashemi Rafsanjani (who had come in first in the initial round) and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the conservative mayor of Tehrān who unexpectedly placed a close second. Subsequently, Ahmadinejad defeated Rafsanjani, securing more than 60 percent of the votes cast.
In contrast to his reform-oriented predecessor, Ahmadinejad generally took a more conservative approach domestically—in 2005 he prohibited state television and radio stations from broadcasting music considered “indecent”—though under his leadership women symbolically were allowed for the first time since the revolution into major sporting events. However, Ahmadinejad’s failure to satisfactorily address continued high rates of inflation and unemployment during his term led to increasing discontent, damaging his favor among segments of both the populace and the administration. His provocative stance regarding Iran’s nuclear program, bolstered by the appointment in 2007 of the hard-line academic Saeed Jalili to lead Iran’s delegation in international negotiations, was also a source of criticism among portions of the country’s pragmatic conservative leadership. Thus, although conservative elements consolidated their control of the Majles in the elections of March 2008—once more, many reformist candidates were banned—the presence of conservative elements critical of Ahmadinejad’s policies prepared the way for greater confrontation between the president and the Majles.
Second presidential term of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: growing discontent and unrest
Although no Iranian president had yet failed to win a second term, as the 2009 presidential election approached, some observers believed that Ahmadinejad’s economic policies and his confrontational style abroad might have rendered him susceptible to a challenge. Ahmadinejad appeared at particular risk of being unseated by one of his moderate challengers, former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi, around whom much of the country’s moderate contingent had coalesced. Voter turnout at the election in mid-June was estimated to reach record highs (polling hours were extended four times to accommodate the turnout), a factor that some interpreted as favorable to Mousavi. Shortly after the polls closed, Mousavi—who claimed he had been contacted by the interior ministry to inform him of his victory—announced that he had won the election outright by a large margin; shortly thereafter, however, officials made a similar announcement in favor of Ahmadinejad. Although Ahmadinejad insisted that the election had been fair and that his mandate had been broadened by the large turnout and the scope of his victory, his opponents alleged electoral fraud. Mousavi urged his supporters to protest the results, and, in the days following the election, massive demonstrations—some of them violent—unfolded in the capital and elsewhere. Although Ayatollah Khamenei initially upheld the election results, he subsequently called for an official inquiry by the Council of Guardians (a body of jurists that reviews legislation and supervises elections) into the allegations of electoral irregularities. The decision was quickly followed by an announcement by the Council of Guardians that the vote would be subject to a partial recount, a motion that fell short of the annulment the opposition had sought.
On June 19, following nearly a week of opposition demonstrations against the election results, Khamenei issued his first public response to the unrest: before a crowd of supporters at Friday prayers, he again backed Ahmadinejad’s victory and warned the opposition against further demonstrations. Subsequent protests were greeted with increasing brutality—various reports indicated that between 10 and 20 protesters had been killed—as well as threats of further confrontation. On June 22 the Council of Guardians confirmed that 50 constituencies had returned more votes than there were registered voters (the opposition alleged that as many as some three times that number of constituencies had a turnout greater than 100 percent of eligible voters). Although irregularities in those 50 constituencies bore the potential to affect some three million votes, the Council of Guardians indicated that this would not change the outcome of the election itself. Following the completion of its partial recount, the council solidified Ahmadinejad’s victory by confirming the election results, and in early August Ahmadinejad was sworn in for his second term as president. Periodic demonstrations and protests persisted in the months that followed, including those held on university campuses and others held at public ʿĀshūrāʾ observances in December, when government forces fired on crowds of protesters, killing at least 10 people.
In 2010, under increasing pressure from international economic sanctions, Iran initiated a major change to its state-directed economy, beginning a program to phase out extensive subsidies for food, fuel, medicine, and other consumer goods over a period of five years; the subsidies were to be replaced with direct cash payments to Iranians. Observers had long considered Iran’s subsidy system, implemented during the Iran-Iraq War, a major strain on the Iranian economy since it encouraged wasteful consumption and drained state finances. However, steep rises in the prices of consumer goods starting in 2011 led to fears that subsidy cuts might fuel social unrest.
Demonstrators held antigovernment rallies in Iran in February 2011 following the wave of mass protests in the Middle East and North Africa that swept Tunisian Pres. Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali and Egyptian Pres. Hosni Mubarak from power. Protesters, ostensibly gathering to show solidarity with Egypt and Tunisia, began chanting slogans critical of Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. The Iranian police and paramilitary forces cracked down, firing tear gas into the crowds and attacking demonstrators. Opposition leaders Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi were placed under house arrest to prevent them from participating in the demonstrations.
In April 2011 a confrontation between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei over Ahmadinejad’s dismissal of the minister of intelligence, a Khamenei ally, evolved into a public power struggle between Ahmadinejad and Khamenei. Khamenei promptly overruled the minister’s dismissal, causing Ahmadinejad to register his displeasure by refusing to attend cabinet meetings or report to his office in the presidential palace for 11 days. In May, Khamenei once again blocked Ahmadinejad’s efforts to accumulate power, forcing him to back down after he attempted to name himself acting minister of oil. Ahmadinejad soon found himself facing increased resistance and criticism from the supreme leader’s conservative supporters. In March 2012 he was summoned by the Majles, Iran’s legislative body, to face questioning over his policies, including withholding funds for Tehrān’s metro system over a personal rivalry with its mayor Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, and his power struggles with Khamenei. The unprecedented questioning of a sitting president by the Majles was widely interpreted as a sign of Ahmadinejad’s declining political stature. His supporters’ poor performance in legislative elections later that month furthered the perception that he was greatly weakened in the last months of his term, which ended in August 2013.
First and second presidential terms of Hassan Rouhani: economic recovery and renewed economic crisis
In June 2013 Hassan Rouhani, a veteran politician and cleric who was generally regarded as a moderate conservative, was elected to succeed Ahmadinejad as president. Rouhani won more than 50 percent of the vote in the first round, allowing him to avoid a runoff. The commanding victory was seen as a rebuke to the hard-line faction represented by Ahmadinejad, whom many voters considered responsible for Iran’s growing international isolation and struggling economy.
Economic conditions stabilized during Rouhani’s first term, with stronger economic growth and manageable levels of inflation. This was largely a result of the reintegration of Iran into the global economy following the signing of an agreement limiting its nuclear program in July 2015 (see below Foreign affairs since 1989). Reformists and centrists made further gains in the legislative elections and elections to the Assembly of Experts (the body responsible for selecting the supreme leader) in February 2016—seemingly indicating voters’ approval of the nuclear agreement—but fell short of majorities.
Running for reelection in 2017, Rouhani espoused a more explicitly reformist agenda and was rewarded with a landslide victory, winning 57 percent of the vote to 38 percent for his nearest competitor, the conservative cleric Ebrahim Raisi.
Early in his second term, though GDP had risen sharply and inflation was at its lowest in decades, it became clear that the benefits of the reintegrated economy were not evenly distributed. Most of the improvement was concentrated in the oil sector. Many Iranians failed to see relief in their everyday lives, as the unemployment rate remained in the double digits, leading to massive demonstrations in December 2017. After the United States abrogated its commitment to the nuclear deal in mid-2018 and reimposed sanctions, GDP contracted once again, and inflation soared to its highest rate in decades.
Iranians returned to the polls in February 2020 to select a new Majles amid a renewed economic crisis and heightened tensions with the United States. The only possible outcome of the election, however, was one that would favor Khamenei: the Guardian Council had disqualified nearly 7,000 candidates, including 90 sitting members of the Majles who were seeking reelection. Most of the disqualified candidates were reformists and centrists, leaving four-fifths of the legislature’s seats entirely uncontested by reformists. Two days before the election, Iranian officials announced two deaths in Qom due to COVID-19, the pandemic disease caused by the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2—the first publicly acknowledged cases in the country—causing a public scare. Voter turnout in the election was the lowest it had been since the 1979 revolution, and conservatives swept the overwhelming majority of seats.
Voter turnout remained below 50 percent in the 2021 presidential election. This time apathy, rather than COVID-19, appeared to keep voters home. Raisi, who had lost the presidential election in 2017, stood again. With Rouhani prevented from running by term limits and the broad disqualification of reformists and high-profile conservatives, Raisi had no viable competitor and won the election with an overwhelming margin of victory.
Presidential term of Ebrahim Raisi
Raisi took office in August 2021 and filled his cabinet with hard-line figures who were expected to bolster the interests of Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards. Facing a surge in COVID-19 infections due to the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, the government ramped up its vaccination drive that same month. Little was done in the ensuing months to address continued hardship and rising inflation, although Raisi’s weekly tours around the country sought to signal his determination to combat the economic crisis.
International discussions regarding the country’s nuclear program had begun in Rouhani’s final months in office, but Raisi’s government was hesitant to return to the negotiations until late November. Still, a budget proposal drafted by Raisi amid the negotiations suggested an expectation that Iran would receive some sanctions relief in the year ahead. Nevertheless, a significant increase in funds allocated to the Revolutionary Guards and other defense institutions indicated that Raisi’s priority was ensuring the regime’s security.
Iran experienced little relief from sanctions, however, as negotiations faltered in early 2022. Moreover, the country’s economy experienced a further toll after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 disrupted the global economy. The government was forced to cut subsidies on food in May, nearly tripling the price of some food products overnight and leading to demonstrations across the country.
In late 2022 the increased emphasis on security at a time of economic despair—including stricter surveillance and censorship—infuriated many Iranians. The death of a Kurdish young woman, Jina Mahsa Amini, while in custody of the Guidance Patrol for “improper” clothing served as a catalyst for widespread and sustained demonstrations in late 2022. The incident amplified several grievances against the regime, including its subjugation of women, its maltreatment of minorities, and its prioritization of regime ideology over Iranians’ welfare. Women took a leading role in the protest movement, removing their veils and cutting their hair in public demonstrations, and a chant long used by Kurdish activists—“Woman, Life, Freedom” (Kurdish: “Jin, Jiyan, Azadî”; Persian: “Zan, Zendegī, Āzādī”)—was widely adopted. The protests pervaded Iranian society and even included Shiʿi clerics who favored voluntary hijab covering. The Guidance Patrol seemed to have vanished, prompting hopes that the government might scrap the head covering requirement altogether. But, as the unrest began subsiding at the beginning of 2023, the government began using surveillance cameras to enforce the mandate more quietly, and the Guidance Patrol later returned to the streets for additional enforcement.
Despite the growing pressure for the regime to unclench its fists, Raisi’s presidency was marked by an expansion in influence from a fundamentalist faction of conservatives known as the Paydari Front. Its members gained prominent positions across Iran’s political institutions and, in fact, spearheaded efforts to implement greater social restrictions in the wake of the 2022 protests. In the March 2024 legislative elections, the faction gained a majority in the Majles and the Assembly of Experts, especially as reformist and centrist figures such as the former president Hassan Rouhani were disqualified from running. Voter turnout was 41 percent, down from 43 percent in 2020.
In May 2024 Raisi died in a helicopter crash following a visit to Azerbaijan, setting the stage for an early presidential election in late June. Mohammad Mokhber, the first vice president, took over as acting president until the election could replace Raisi.
The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica