Election 2021: How Leader's Speeches Conditioned Candidates and Voters

The preliminary results of the 13^th presidential election showed a clear victory for Ebrahim Raisi, as expected. His share of the vote – such as it was – was so large that other candidates congratulated him even before the final results were announced.

Raisi was the preferred candidate of Ali Khamenei and his like-minded associates in the Iranian regime. In his speeches on the 2021 vote, Khamenei had repeatedly used keywords that matched the themes deployed by Raisi in debates.

Allegations of electoral engineering long preceded the vote and issues on the day are likely to compound these suspicions. What did the Supreme Leader say and do that could have influenced the outcome?

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The words of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic hold enormous sway over the portion of the electorate inclined to support the regime. In the pre-election period, Ali Khamenei gave a number of indications that he was fully on board with a project to ensure a favorable outcome for one candidate only: Ebrahim Raisi.  

Khamenei has openly sought to engineer previous elections in Iran, but with varying degrees of success. He has always made coded references to his favorite candidates, but was overturned by the public vote in both 1997 and 2009.

This time, however, the stakes were high amid unprecedented economic and political crisis in the Islamic Republic, and a series of recent events firing up popular discontent. He and his entourage could not afford to lose, and found a way to circumvent any serious challenge.

Khamenei has repeatedly described his ideal government model in recent years. The phrases “young revolutionary government” and “Hezbollahi government” have been among the most frequently deployed by the Supreme Leader in the context of elections. Khamenei has also long insisted on domestically-generated power and Iran’s non-reliance on foreign countries. So much so, that these are the two statements that were listed on the Supreme Leader’s website in late March as his "most important and enduring" of 2020.

The constant emphasis of these two issues over the past two years has been interpreted by Khmaenei’s supporters as an implicit critique of Rouhani's government. Consequentially, they have been used as an excuse to attack Hassan Rouhani.

With regard to his first prescription, though, Khamenei has always stressed that he did not mean "that the head of this government should be a 32-year-old”. In 2017, he said it meant Iran would not be prosperous except through jihadist and "revolutionary" labors. In the same year, the Supreme Leader’s official website published an "electronic booklet" detailing his most important speeches and positions taken in elections from 2001 to 2017.

At the beginning of the Iranian year 1400 (March 2021-2022), the Supreme Leader began to ramp up his public proclamations about the forthcoming election. In his New Year speech, Khamenei said he considered participation as a way to strengthen the country on the whole, and reiterated his position of eight years ago: "Everyone, even those who may not accept the leader, would accept a strong Iran is a way to counter hostilities."

In this speech, Ayatollah Khamenei forcefully denied the widely-perceived powerlessness of the president, which Iran’s own state media has referred to as the “chief executive” rather than a decision-maker. "The position of the president is the most important and effective managerial position in the country,” he said, “and repeating things like ‘the president has no authority’ or is only a facilitator, is false. It is irresponsible and uninformed."

The notion of the president being a “facilitator” was first popularized by former president Mohammad Khatami, who denounced the executive’s lack of power at the end of his reformist government in 2005.

In recent months Ayatollah Khamenei has also sought to pour cold water on any suspicions of electoral fraud – despite evidence having eventually surfaced of ballot-stuffing on Friday. In a televised speech in early April, coinciding with Ramadan, Khamenei declared: “There has never been a violation in our elections that would make them unreliable or affect the outcome.”

He then criticized the positions of some of the other would-be candidates, without naming them, suggesting they stood against the Iranian Constitution. At the time, old-school reformist Mostafa Tajzadeh had just announced that he planned to stand, leading some to assume that the remarks were directed at him.

A few days later, in a video conference with Iranian student organizations, Ayatollah Khamenei reaffirmed his belief in Iran’s "internal capabilities" and the notion that the "youth" should engage in a "revolutionary performance." So far, so predictable – but then the Supreme Leader also astonishingly claimed that he never commented on individual candidacies.

"In the past,” Khamenei said, “those who wanted to be nominated would come and ask me whether I agreed. I said ‘I do not agree, I do not disagree’, and I will say the same this year."

The remarks were met with disbelief by social media users who pointed to Khamenei’s only-recent discouragement of Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of the founder of the Islamic Republic, from running in the 2021 election. Others recalled that he had barred Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from running in 2017.

As the election deadline approached, and two days after the controversial mass disqualification of the more serious presidential candidates by the Guardian Council, the Leader of the Islamic Republic adopted a new position.

In a video conference with members of parliament, Khamenei expressed his firm support for the Guardian Council, as usual, but he also tried to appease some of those who had been disqualified (including Ali Larijani). “The Guardian Council has enemies,” he said. “It has serious enemies. Now is an opportunity for them to take revenge. God Almighty will not forgive these people."

Elsewhere, Khamenei began to indirectly draw up a framework for the candidates’ future public debates. Unusually, he began to raise issues of foreign policy and cyberspace governance, but only so as to dismiss them and say that unemployment and livelihoods were at the forefront of the electorate’s minds.

Then on the anniversary of Ayatollah Khomeini's death and one day before the start of the televized debates, the Supreme Leader made another speech on the elections. He mentioned the “persecution” of some disqualified candidates and demanded “compensation and the restoration of dignity" from the responsible bodies. This was not intended as a call for Ali Larijani to be reinstated, however, but was an implicit warning to candidates not to repeat false claims about his daughter having foreign citizenship.

The last words of the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, delivered on Wednesday two days before the vote, focused on the issue of the planned boycott by huge swathes of Iranian society. Some people from “weak” and “deprived” backgrounds, he said, might be unhappy but must nonetheless cast a vote in order to “legitimize the system”. He also wrongly blamed the planned boycott on Iran’s economic problems in an implicit swipe at the Rouhani government, and expressed hope that the next government would be able to resolve them.

He also stressed that a president elected with a large number of votes would enjoy “strong support” during their tenure. Hours later, Saeed Jalili resigned, in all likelihood prompted by this very point.

On the morning of June 18, as some Iranians went to the polls, Khamenei egged them on from the sidelines. He t described the presence of the people as a "great privilege" for the Islamic Republic that would improve its standing in the international arena, and assured people on Twitter: "The nation will benefit from this election, God willing."

This time, the Leader of the Islamic Republic has secured his desired president. But with the current problems racking the country, it is not clear how his relationship with Raisi will change in the months and years to come.

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