Can Iran's presidential election save Khamenei and his regime?

On the first day of the Persian New Year 1400 (21 March), the Supreme Leader of the Iranian regime, Ali Khamenei, devoted the most important part of his Nowruz speech to Iran's presidential elections scheduled for June. During the past 32 years that Khamenei has ruled Iran as Supreme Leader, eight presidential elections have been held.

In 2009, President Ahmadinejad was re-elected due to widespread fraud on Khamenei's orders that sparked large protests across Iran. The regime responded with lethal force, killing protesters.

Since the 2017 nationwide protests, Iranians have actively expressed their hatred for both factions, hardliners and so-called reformists, and have called for regime change. So why is Iran's presidential election so important to Khamenei?

The Iranian regime is in its weakest state since the 1979 revolution that toppled the Shah. Indeed, according to regime officials, more than 70 million people in Iran are dissatisfied with the current situation and want a fundamental change in the ruling system. The economic and living conditions of Iranians have deteriorated over the past 42 years, with more than 60 per cent of the population living below the poverty line. The middle class has disappeared and almost 35 million people have been driven to the outskirts of cities due to poverty and inability to pay for housing. Many workers have not received even their meagre wages for months. Food inflation has reached over 60 per cent in almost every province in Iran, so many people have long since eliminated items such as meat and fruit from their shopping baskets and even buy bread in instalments.

Scavenging, selling body parts and even selling children, which is unprecedented in Iran, has become commonplace. Addiction and suicide rates have reached unprecedented levels, especially among young people from the lower classes. Iranians who overthrew the Shah in the hope of freedom and a better life now face oppression and dictatorship on the one hand, and poverty, misery and rampant corruption on the other.

As a result, society has become a powder keg ready to explode at any moment with a small spark. The nationwide protests that took place in 2017 and 2019 in Iran are manifestations of this fact. While Khamenei was eventually able to stop the protests and prevent the fall of his regime with brutal crackdowns at the time, it is unlikely that he will be able to control and suppress future protests.

Despite his power over everything in the regime, including his title of commander-in-chief and his absolute dominance over the judiciary, Khamenei has always claimed innocence when it comes to the people's misfortunes. He has always blamed the government and the president for the people's plight.

But now the situation is so serious that there is a struggle between the two factions of the regime to maintain and save the ruling system. While the "reformists" have always stolen the wealth of the Iranian people and suppressed protests along with the hardliners, they see the way out of the current stalemate in interaction with the West and the US and want to reduce the powers of the Supreme Leader and increase the prerogatives of the president.

Current President Hassan Rohani, who is a supposed reformist, recently raised the issue of holding a referendum to increase the president's prerogatives, but was strongly opposed by hardliners.

However, the main problem for Khamenei is not the dispute over the JCPOA nuclear deal or disagreement with his own presidents. He knows that the economic crisis, corruption, unemployment, poverty and other problems that enrage Iranians have put society in an explosive state, prone to protests that could bring down his regime.

Therefore, for the survival of his regime and to maintain his hegemony, he must take control of the situation. The first thing he intends to do is to end the current divisions among the regime elites by engineering Iran's presidential elections, despite the fact that the current and previous presidents were all his partners in crime and in the deal of repression, looting and terrorism.

Khamenei knows that, if he does not live up to his authority as Supreme Leader, this will create even more divisions in the ruling system and bring down his regime. He sees a way out of this situation by unifying his regime as much as possible while increasing repression inside Iran.

He made this clear during his Nowruz speech and said that the presidential elections must be "unipolar".

The various protests seen almost daily in Iran can quickly escalate into a confrontation between the people and the security forces and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the latest of which we saw last month in the provinces of Sistan, Baluchistan and Hormozgan and recently in Bushehr province. Any such protests could be the spark that both sides of the regime fear and constantly remind each other that, if people take to the streets, the "regime's ship will sink" and take both hardliners and "reformists" with it.