The Last Hope of the Iranian Reformists

Former Health Minister Masoud Pezeshkian is the first major reformist candidate to be allowed to run for Iran's presidency in almost a decade. But can even he stop the Islamic Republic's crisis?

Time comes for us all. People, political causes, faith in a system.

The reformist movement in Iran, expressing a desire to mold the Islamic Republic into a still-Islamic system more accepting of differing opinions, of a free press, and of women’s rights, has been for years now subject to a slow, painful death.

The reformists had achieved the presidency only once before, during the time of Mohammad Khatami, who won two terms in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Hopes for a potential future of engagement with the West and a wider scope for expression within the country were dashed by a judiciary hell-bent on suppressing the words of those who supported the then-president’s vision, and state security forces more than happy to brutalize those angered by such moves.

Protests, led by students, eventually exceeded the demands of their president and sought his overthrow, considering him too weak, too ineffectual, too indebted to and supportive of those who supposedly wanted to hold the Iranian people back. Some figures of these demonstrations became so disillusioned with that failure that they began backing whoever was opposed to the Islamic Republic, no matter the source, even to the point of draping themselves in the flags of Israel and Imperial Iran.

When reformists like former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi attempted to defeat Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009, many disappointed after the failures of Khatami felt reinvigorated. After Mousavi accused Ahmadinejad of voter fraud (a charge which admittedly remains without substantial evidence), millions of Iranians turned out to the streets behind a man who was promising radical change, and who it seemed would be willing to fight to the end to catapult their wishes into the heart of power. Mousavi would eventually be placed under house arrest, a punishment that would never be lifted from his shoulders. Photos would emerge years later of Mousavi and his wife, who had, in the decade since, become elderly, the world and those hopes having long since passed them by.

Mir-Hossein Mousavi (center) greets election supporters in 2009.

The reformist movement would continue to face sidelining, but it still won parliamentary successes into the 2010s and assisted in the significant achievement of the Iran nuclear deal. The quick destruction of that deal by President Trump, the cascading downward of the moderate then-President Hassan Rouhani, and then the disqualification of most reformist candidates in elections in the 2020s, have been some factors among many leading to many Iranians, primarily young ones, exiting participation in the political system entirely.

Criticisms of the reformists by Iranians who would otherwise be their base typically rally under the following banners: They may want to do things, but they can’t. And even if they could do things, they are unwilling to change what needs to be changed.

Those still left in the movement have since been looking for a way back in. Not just back into the good graces of the system, but also the hearts and minds of those disaffected who have turned either to conservative politicians styling themselves as anti-establishment figures (like Ahmadinejad), or more critically, those who are turning to outright opposition to the state.

Now, after being beaten, bruised, and almost wrung out of existence, the reformists have received perhaps its biggest shot in almost a decade, if not longer: Masoud Pezeshkian.