The Glow of the Zarif Effect Dims, Slightly

Just a few months into the election of Hassan Rouhani’s government, a political commentator close to the president’s inner circle pronounced that Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif’s inexperience with the complexities of Iranian domestic politics would sooner or later prove troublesome. “From the first moment he was introduced as foreign minister, there were worries about how this would lead to serious challenges for him,” wrote Foad Sadeghi.

Back then, such was the glow of Zarif’s popularity that some pro-Rouhani journalists even discussed Zarif a possible presidential candidate in 2021. But a year into Rouhani’s first term, Sadeghi’s anxieties seem more than prescient.

The problems besetting Zarif are highlighted by the recent feature about the foreign minister that appeared in the hardline newspaper Vatan-e Emrouz about the foreign minister. It is accompanied by two photos of Zarif, one in color showing him upbeat and cheerful, the second in black and white, with Zarif appearing gloomy and tired. The caption simply reads: “U-Turn”.

The article picks up apart Zarif’s role in a recent campaign launched by six prominent Iranian film directors; these are people who do not usually agree on social and political issues of the day, but came together to announce their support for Rouhani’s nuclear diplomacy. 

The campaign ran its own poster campaign that argued: “Any agreement is better than no agreement,” a view that infuriated hardliners, who believe that Rouhani’s government is willing to concede Iran’s legitimate nuclear rights in order to secure a deal.  When it emerged that the directors had launched the campaign at Zarif’s behest, the hardliners focused their anger on the foreign minister, charging him with playing the nuclear card to influence upcoming parliamentary elections.

What Zarif had likely envisioned as a savvy strategy to kindle public support for the nuclear negotiations has ended up exploding into a domestic fracas. Mehdi Mohammadi, a member of former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s nuclear team, attacked the campaign once again this week in Vatan-e Emrouz. He called the directors’ campaign reckless, and said it signaled to the West that the Iranian negotiators are so desperate for a deal that they will take anything, even the a wholesale dismantling of Iran’s nuclear program.

But what seems to have upset hardliners most is the connection they perceive between the directors’ championing of nuclear diplomacy and the elections for parliament. Mohammadi thus wrote: “The negotiating team believes that a continuation of the present situation will weaken the middle class, the same people who are supposed to vote for Mr. Zarif’s friends in the elections.”

These days, Zarif has become the veritable punching bag of the hardline establishment; infuriated by the foreign minister’s initial rock start popularity and their own domestic setbacks, going after Zarif is now the easiest way for hardliners to conduct politics. Zarif responded to allegations around the poster campaign and said that he had been misunderstood, but a number of the campaign organizers pulled out as a result of the onslaught, scoring a victory for the hardliners who sought to sabotage Zarif’s public diplomacy.

As needling hardline attacks mount against his public positions, Zarif has sharply reduced his presence on social media, alongside other members of Rouhani’s government. His skills in public diplomacy seem only to create more fodder for costly political attacks, in the vicious partisan atmosphere of Iranian domestic politics.

His forceful pronouncements, which gained him great popularity among young and educated Iranians, have also landed him in trouble. In December of last year, he addressed a gathering of students at Tehran University:  “Do you think the US, which can wipe out our whole defense system with one bomb, is afraid of our defense system?” This ignited the ire of all hardliners, including the Revolutionary Guards commander Mohammad Ali Jafari, and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei scolded Zarif publicly.

“When a government official gives an opinion about military questions and that opinion is untrue,” Khamenei said in July of this year, “then I say organize a tour for government officials. They should spend a little time in military facilities and see the facts for themselves so that they would gain a better understanding of the country’s military.” The tour took place two months later and at its conclusion, Zarif praised Iran’s military readiness.

More recently, it is not only critics of the government who are displeased with Zarif. The foreign minister has repeatedly denied violations of human rights in Iran, characterizing human rights pressure as a political pretext used by the West to extract concessions from Iran. Last week a 135 Iranian journalist wrote a letter to President Rouhani criticizing him for denying that many journalists have been imprisoned in Iran.

It may be too early to judge definitively whether the predictions about Zarif’s political greenness will prove fatal, but his lack of instinct for the sensitivities of the domestic scene are readily apparent. Rouhani and Zarif’s media teams will need to craft a response to these weaknesses, while their opponents are skilled at exploiting their every misstep. Until then, the press will need to fufil that role. Last week the pro-Rouhani Aftab-e Yazd featured a picture of Zarif on its front page, under the headline “The National Ace”.