Iran’s Voters Sent a Message to the Hard-Liners

The New Yorker

BY ROBIN WRIGHT

Ianians revel in political humor. Over the weekend, as election results began to show that long-entrenched hard-liners were losing, a new joke circulated in Tehran: Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif had called Secretary of State John Kerry with an offer: “John, we have just succeeded in defeating our hard-liners. Let us know if you want advice on how to beat Mr. Trump.”

Iran’s twin polls—for the Majlis, or parliament, and for the Assembly of Experts, which chooses the country’s Supreme Leader—weren’t quite that straightforward. Before the vote, most reformists were disqualified by the government’s mercurial vetting process. Voters countered by rejecting big-name hard-liners who had blocked reforms at home and tried to stymy the nuclear deal with the outside world. The result is a wave of new faces in Iranian politics; only about a third of the winners are incumbents in parliament.

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