Will Raisi be able to lure voters away?
london — Hardline cleric Ebrahim Raisi, a harsh critic of the West and the standard bearer of Iran’s security hawks, has drawn on economic discontent to mount an unexpectedly strong challenge to pragmatist Hasan Rohani in Friday’s presidential elections.
A protege of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Raisi has focused his campaign on the economy, visiting rural areas and small villages, promising the poor housing, jobs and more welfare benefits.
“I represent labourers, women without guardians, those who have a lot to say but have no microphone,” the 56-year-old cleric said in a televised presidential debate.
Iranian media have speculated that he could go even further than the presidency as a possible successor to his patron Khamenei, the 77-year-old who has been in power since 1989 and whose authority exceeds that of the elected president.
Raisi has promised to create six million jobs in his first term if elected, and to triple monthly cash handouts to the lower class. Rohani’s allies call such promises “populist” and say Raisi has not explained how he will pay for them.
Reformists say they are alarmed by Raisi’s background as a hardline judge, especially during the 1980s when he was one of four judges that imposed death penalties on thousands of political prisoners.
In the tense final televised debate, Rohani stretched the boundaries of permissible rhetoric in Iran to paint Raisi as a power-hungry pawn of the security services. “Mr. Raisi, you can slander me as much you wish. As a judge of the clerical court, you can even issue an arrest order. But please don’t abuse religion for power,” Rohani said at one point. He said “security and revolutionary groups” were busing people to Raisi’s rallies, and asked who financed them.
But Raisi’s economic message could win traction with voters who have seen few benefits so far from Rohani’s nuclear deal.
Raisi says the president sold out Iran’s interests too cheaply to the West, betting too strongly on rapprochement with enemies while doing too little at home to boost production. “Our problems cannot be resolved by Americans and Westerners,” Raisi said in September. “They have not resolved a single problem of any country. They have brought nothing but misery to other nations.”
“The nuclear deal is like a cheque that Rohani’s government was not able to cash,” he said in a TV interview.
Raisi is a mid-ranking figure in the hierarchy of Iran’s clergy but has been a senior official for decades in the judiciary which enforces clerical control of the country.
Last year Khamenei named him custodian of Astan Qods Razavi, an organisation in charge of a multi-billion-dollar religious foundation that manages donations to the country’s holiest shrine in the northern city of Mashhad.