Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani: Decline, demise, and doubts over his legacy
On Tuesday noon, the body of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani was laid to rest in southern Tehran, next to his guru and patron, Ayatollah Rouhollah Khomeini, leader of the Islamic Revolution.
In the mild cold of Tuesday morning in Tehran, hundreds of thousands of mourners gathered in and around Tehran University, where Hashemi performed his last swan song in July 2009 -a Friday prayers’ sermon in defense of post-election protestors, to bid farewell to “the pillar of Revolution”, a man that saw both love and hate from various sides of Iran’s political spectrum.
Hashemi’s funeral was not short of a redux of his last Friday prayers’ in 2009 – held amid the largest post-Revolution demonstrations against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s reelection in a controversial poll: a tense mood prevailed, with establishment loyalists and protestors rubbing elbows, chanting their slogans for and against each other every couple of minutes. Protestors dominated apparently, shouting down the voice of loyalists most of the times. There was a significant difference this time, however – apart from Hashemi’s death: most slogans no more called for annulment of election results, but release of the leaders of the Green Movement, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mahdi Karroubi, who have been under house arrest since early 2011.
Few tears of sadness were shed by the crowd in Tuesday’s funeral. After all, unlike other Iranian political leaders, Hashemi Rafsanjani drew his strength not from a charismatic character or a solid support base, but from his shrewdness, his “a unique intelligence” as his decades-long friend Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei wrote in his message of condolence. More than a sense of sorrow, Hashemi’s relevantly fresh group of supporters, Reformists and moderates, were imbued with a feeling of uncertainty and worry about the political future of their camp now that their most powerful link to the hard core of the establishment had departed.
Despite his lack of a strong, clear electoral base, mostly due to his shifting alliance between the two main political camps, Hashemi never shunned exposure to citizens’ vote. It was the combination of these two elements, see-saw politics and participation in elections, actually, that triggered his downhill political career from the early 2000s onwards. Tehran, the capital and the thriving political heart of the country, had an undeniable role in his decline: in February 2000 parliamentary elections, Hashemi stepped in to assume control of the parliament and thwart Reformists from consolidating their grip over two of the three powers. The results proved embarrassing for him nonetheless: he barely made it to the parliament as the last eligible candidate, and resigned prematurely following immense social and political pressure from the Reform camp.
Reformists came to regret their ruthless assailment against the seasoned cleric a few years later. In the 2005 presidential election, Hashemi Rafsanjani had to face Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a fresh face who appeared to be modest, anti-corruption, and from the grassroots, all antitheses to what Hashemi was known for. Reformists found it hard to convince their supporters to vote for a man who they had smeared only four years earlier.
Fearing from hardliners’ creeping retake of all power bases, Tehran casted a belated vote in favor of a 72-year-old Hashemi Rafsanjani in December 2006, crowning him as the top candidate in elections for the Assembly of Experts, an elective clerical assigned with supervising the conduct of the incumbent Supreme Leader and choosing his successor. But the damage had been already done, and both Hashemi and Reformists, one slower than the other, were destined to be pushed out of power.
The 2009 presidential election and its aftermath revved up this marginalization project. Ahmadinejad successfully shaped his campaign around bashing Hashemi, again, accusing the cleric to be the prime mover behind electoral campaign of his rivals, Mir Hossein Mousavi, Mahdi Karroubi, Mohsen Rezaei, and all the Reformist and centrist forces of the establishment fearful about the rise of a younger generation of politicians, neo-revolutionaries whose ungainly style of governance harked back to the early years of the Islamic Revolution. The cutthroat, winner-takes-all competition inflicted substantial damage on Hashemi’s clout. His vocal daughter, Faezeh, a powerful voice of support for the Green Movement, received a six-month sentence on political charges, something unfathomable a few years earlier. His second son, Mahdi, accused of financing the after-election ‘sedition’, flee the country amid the turmoil.
Infighting among Principlists, Ahmadinejad’s political blunder in defying Ayatollah Khamenei’s request to keep his minister of intelligence at place, and the biting effect of toughening international sanctions against Iran’s nuclear program, brought a silver lining for Hashemi and what had remained of Reformists on the political stage. In another sign of Hashemi’s diminishing status, he was barred by the Guardian Council to run in presidential elections. Yet, the ayatollah already had a Plan B in mind, and introduced his protégé, Hassan Rouhani, as the alternative.
Rouhani’s surprise victory reinvigorated the Moderate-Reformist alliance, and revived hopes of Iran getting back on the track of domestic reform and détente with the outside world. Nonetheless, it was clear that without the Reformists’ popularity and the moderate’s power of the late 90s, the alliance had to jump high hurdles. Hashemi registered another political coup de maître in February 2016 general elections, carving victory from naught despite another merciless bout of disqualification of Reformist and moderate candidates by the Guardian Council, one that even victimized Hassan Khomeini, grandson of the founder of Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Khomeini. The electoral slate endorsed by Hashemi and his Reformist allies for Tehran parliamentary elections, the “Hope List”, was able to send all its candidates into the parliament. The coalition’s peculiar slate for simultaneous Assembly of Expert poll, a ‘no-list’ made up primarily to jettison hardliner candidates Ahmad Jannati, Mohammad Yazdi, and Taghi Mesbah Yazdi from the assembly, managed to win all seats of Tehran Province constitution except one. Ahmad Jannati became the final eligible candidate to enter the assembly, and was elected as head of the body much to Hashemi’s dismay.
“I can now die in peace” Hashemi had said in May 2016, feeling assured that he had “rescued” the revolution from the hands of Ahmadinejad. However, Hashemi’s death hardly brings peace to his allies, who know that with his departure, they have lost their most powerful voice in a reluctantly receptive establishment.
IRD/66