Iranian Moderate Elected President in Rebuke to Conservatives
▻https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/16/world/middleeast/iran-election.html?hp&_r=0
By THOMAS ERDBRINK
Published: June 15, 2013
TEHRAN — In a striking repudiation of the ultraconservatives who wield power in Iran, voters have overwhelmingly elected a mild-mannered cleric who campaigned on seeking greater personal freedoms and a more conciliatory approach to the world.
Iranian state television reported on Saturday that the cleric, Hassan Rowhani, 64, had more than 50 percent of the vote, enough to avoid a runoff in the race to replace the departing president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose tenure was defined largely by provocation with the West and a seriously hobbled economy at home.
The hard-line conservatives aligned with the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, placed at the back of the pack of six candidates, indicating that Iranians were looking for their next president to change the tone, if not the direction of the nation, by choosing a cleric who served as the lead nuclear negotiator under an earlier reformist president, Mohammad Khatami.
During the Khatami era, Iran froze its nuclear program, eased social restrictions and promoted dialogue with the West. Friday’s election, which electrified a nation that had lost faith in its electoral process, also served the supreme leader’s goals: restoring at least a patina of legitimacy to the theocratic state, providing a safety valve for a public distressed by years of economic malaise and isolation, and returning a cleric to the presidency. Mr. Ahmadinejad was the first noncleric to hold the presidency, and he often clashed with the religious order and its traditionalist allies.
Mr. Rowhani has been a strong supporter of the disputed nuclear program. And while he is expected to tone down the tough language with the West, he also once boasted that during the period that Iran suspended uranium enrichment, it had made its greatest nuclear advances because the pressure was off.
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