Euphoria in Tehran as supporters of centrist President Hassan Rouhani give hardline theocrats a thumping at the polls. Enthusiasm abroad at the appetising prospect of President Rouhani of Iran, the architect of last year’s nuclear deal with the major international powers, prising open a hitherto isolated market of 80m people. But have we not been here before?
In May 1997, Mohammad Khatami, a reformist former culture minister forced out of office in 1992 for “permissiveness”, was elected president with 70 per cent of the vote on a nearly 90 per cent turnout — an avalanche the ruling elites did not see coming. With popular adulation on tap, President Khatami promised a freer society and accountable government under the rule of law. Within a year he tried opening a “dialogue of civilisations” with the US, tempting then President Bill Clinton with a Nixon-to-China moment. But it all ended in tears.
The hardliners regrouped easily around their strongholds in the judiciary, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the appointed Guardian Council that oversees parliament and, above all, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme Leader. Mr Khatami was unable to stop parliament impeaching his allies. Politically diminished, his May 2003 offer to President George W Bush of a “grand bargain” with the US was spurned, paving the way for the election of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, his mercurial and messianic successor.
When the reformists next raised their heads, in protest at the rigged re-election of Mr Ahmadi-Nejad in 2009, their Green Movement was put down without mercy. So what has changed, now that Mr Rouhani’s impressive showing in Friday’s elections has rekindled hope once more?
The balance of power within the Islamic Republic looks broadly the same. The Islamic institutions, mostly appointed and answerable to the Supreme Leader, still far outweigh the democratically elected, republican institutions accountable to the voters. The 290-member parliament, however, in which Mr Rouhani’s coalition of reformists, moderate conservatives and independents will now field a powerful bloc against the hardliners, should be better placed to enact the economic reforms required to enable the investment that Iran desperately needs.
The context in which change might unfold is also different. Iran is now bent on re-engaging with the world and rebuilding its economic strength. Its young population is fed up with being dictated to by ageing reactionaries with a fossilised ideology that keeps Iran isolated.
Another way of looking at the political line-up — rather than the dated and reductive split between reformists and hardliners — is to see a quite broad church that backs this policy, against those who opposed the nuclear deal and see any opening up as tantamount to treason. The former had the backing of the Supreme Leader on the nuclear deal, endorsed by the outgoing speaker of parliament, Ali Larijani, an influential conservative traditionally identified with the hardliners but now aligned with Mr Rouhani. Many of the latter have just been sent packing by the voters.
The political forces that want the country gradually to open up, moreover, are working to get inside the institutions that count in Iran. Friday’s elections were not just to the parliament but also to the 88-member Assembly of Experts, an arcane clerical body that now really matters — because it selects and can even “supervise” the Supreme Leader. It is probable that its eight-year term will encompass the succession to an ailing Mr Khamenei.
The Rouhani list won 15 of the 16 Tehran seats in the Assembly, sweeping aside its reactionary leadership. Top of the list, ahead of Mr Rouhani, was Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, another former president and the arch-fixer at the heart of Iranian realpolitik, who is floating the idea of a leadership council to replace the Supreme Leader when the time comes. Mr Rouhani is no novice either: a veteran of the Assembly, linchpin of the national security council for almost three decades, former chief nuclear negotiator and winner of nine out of 10 elections.
Although superficially he resembles Mr Khatami, his ally, Mr Rouhani is tougher, a survivor who can call on a wider array of insider support. There is another important difference between the two men. Twenty years ago, the regime feared Mr Khatami might be a Mikhail Gorbachev, who would bring down the curtain on the Iranian revolution, just as Mr Gorbachev did on the Soviet Union. In fact, the last Soviet leader was admired more abroad than at home. Mr Khatami was a mirror image: with little international echo of his vast following in Iran.
That too has changed. With the nuclear deal, an international tilt towards Iran is under way. The US and Europe, out of a mix of geopolitical pragmatism and a sense of commercial opportunity, want Iran back. Fierce battles lie ahead for Mr Rouhani, but unlike Mr Khatami, this president is in with a chance.