CONSERVATIVE cleric Ebrahim Raisi has been elected by the Iranians as their eighth president since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The senior judge will leave his current post as head of the judiciary in early August to replace President Hassan Rouhani. Raisi was born in 1960 in the northeastern city of Mashhad into a religious family. He received a doctorate degree in law and jurisprudence from Mottahari University in Tehran, according to his campaign website. Raisi has been a key figure in Iran’s judiciary since the early 1980s. He has devoted most of his life so far to law studies and judicial and supervisory tasks inside the Iranian state apparatus. According to the biographical notes released by Raisi’s campaign, he became politically active at the age of 17, and took part in sit-ins at the University of Tehran in the run-up for the revolution. In 1981, when he was 20 years old, Raisi was appointed the prosecutor of the city of Karaj near Tehran. Two years later, he was appointed the prosecutor of Hamedan — a city over 180 miles (298 kilometers) away from Karaj —while keeping his job as prosecutor of Karaj. He served as the prosecutor of both cities simultaneously for several months until he was promoted to prosecutor of Hamedan province. In 1985, Raisi moved to the capital Tehran, where he served as deputy prosecutor. Other senior positions Raisi served in include deputy chief justice from 2004 until 2014, and attorney-general from 2014 until 2016. While he has been a key figure in Iran’s judiciary for decades, Raisi is a fairly new player in the Islamic Republic’s political arena. In 2016, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei appointed Raisi as the custodian of Astan-e Qods-e Razavi, a multibillion-dollar religious conglomerate encompassing businesses and endowments that oversees the holy Shia shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, the home city of both Khamenei and Raisi. Raisi was named as one of the principlist presidential candidates in 2017. He officially announced his nomination and called it his “religious and revolutionary responsibility to run.” Yet, he then lost to incumbent President Hassan Rouhani and ranked second. But his rise within Iran’s ruling establishment went on uninterrupted. In 2019, Khamenei appointed him head of the judiciary, one of the most senior positions within the Islamic Republic. Since Raisi started acting as an assistant prosecutor in Karaj soon after the new political system was established in the country, one of the primary activities assigned to him has been fighting corruption inside the state apparatus, especially since he was appointed head of the General Inspection Organization of Iran, which became one of the main supervising bodies in the country under his direction between 1994 and 2004. The fight against corruption was also highlighted as one of Raisi’s main tasks when he was designated judiciary chief, after successive embezzlement scandals undermined public trust in the Iranian institutions. In a statement regarding the reasons why he would decide to run for president, Raisi pointed to the fight against corruption as his top priority, along with improving the livelihood of the people and boosting the vaccination process against COVID-19. While Iranian conservatives have been harshly critical of the 2015 nuclear agreement, especially since former U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew Washington from the deal and reimposed sanctions on Iran, Raisi has stressed his commitment to the agreement. In the third televised debate of the campaign, he declared that the implementation of the agreement requires an “authoritative” or “powerful government” in Iran. Raisi’s administration will “put back the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) on its original track,” Raisi’s campaign wrote in a foreign policy document published on its official website. The campaign for Raisi also restated known principles of Tehran’s foreign policy such as the refusal to negotiate “Iran’s deterrence including missiles” or Iran’s regional influence. Meanwhile, it stressed the importance of “economic diplomacy,” and clearly stated that Tehran will prioritize the development of relations with neighboring countries and “the peripheral area, especially in Asia” to activate Iran’s economic potential. The president-elect will face three major challenges in boosting economy, dispelling political concerns and fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. During the TV debates before the presidential voting, all the qualified candidates unanimously acknowledged uncertainty in the economic outlook of the country, with some blaming the U.S. sanctions and COVID-19 pandemic as the major causes of the country’s current poor economic condition. Government officials pledged to curb the inflation rate and to restore economic growth after the 2015 nuclear deal was reached and major international and Western anti-Iran sanctions were lifted by then, but such a hope started to fade away following Trump’s decision to withdraw the United States from the deal in 2018 and reimpose sanctions on Tehran. Some analysts believe that Iran has missed the opportunity to carry out monetary and budgetary reforms, attract foreign investments, and restore stability and growth in economy. According to the Financial Tribune daily June 16, currently the country’s budget imbalance stands at 50 percent. It means that the country’s expenses will soon outgrow resources, and will increase the likelihood of future defaults unless the general condition of the country improves, the report quoted Masoud Nili, a senior Iranian economic expert, as saying. The International Monetary Fund expects the inflation rate in Iran to rise to 39 percent in 2021 from 36.5 percent last year and the unemployment rate to increase from 10.8 percent to 11.2 percent, according to the report. With Washington’s abrupt withdrawal from the JCPOA and the reimposition and intensification of sanctions against Iran, the United States challenged all parties to the deal, but it was Iran that suffered the most from the unilateral move. The ongoing negotiations among the representatives of Iran and those of the P4+1, including Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia, in Vienna are aimed at resuming the relevant parties’ commitment to the JCPOA and setting the mechanism for lifting U.S. economic and financial sanctions against the Islamic Republic. Despite major progresses, the talks have also met with obstacles that could make an immediate revival of the deal a far cry. In the meantime, regional convergence may also rank high on the agenda of Iran’s next government. Although there are challenges in this regard, what can guarantee the political success of the future government could be a strategic relationship with neighboring countries. Recently, Iran and Saudi Arabia have entered into negotiations, brokered by Iraq, in a bid to ease tensions and to settle disputes over rivalry political influences in Syria, Yemen and Iraq. Iran’s already injured economy under the U.S. sanctions has been damaged further by the COVID-19 pandemic. Iranian authorities have denounced the U.S. sanctions and delays in the shipments of vaccines as a drag on its vaccination campaign. (SD-Xinhua) | 