The Iranian presidency seems to be a cursed position. Of the eight men who have held it before the current president, five eventually found themselves politically marginalized after their term finished. Two others fell to violent deaths in office (a bomb attack in 1981, a helicopter crash in 2024). The only exception is Ali Khamenei, who went on to become the supreme leader.
Hassan Rouhani, Iran’s centrist president from 2013 to 2021, could be poised to break the spell and stage a political comeback.
The prospect seemed far-fetched until recently. Pressed on one side by hard-liners and on the other by opponents of the Islamic Republic, the regime’s centrists and reformists had become political nonentities. In the last years of his rule, Rouhani was among the most hated men in Iran. His landmark achievement, the 2015 nuclear deal with the Obama administration and five other powerful countries, was destroyed when President Donald Trump withdrew from the deal in 2018. Iran’s security forces, which are not controlled by the president, killed hundreds of protesters in 2017 and 2019 while he looked on. He was followed as president by the hard-line Ebrahim Raisi, picked in 2021 in an uncompetitive election. With Khamenei’s backing, the hard-liners went on to capture most of the available instruments of power in Tehran. Last January, Rouhani was even denied a run for the seat he had held since 2000 in the Assembly of Experts, a body tasked with appointing the supreme leader.
But the events of 2024 shifted the balance of power in the Middle East—and inside Iran. Israel’s battering of Hamas and Hezbollah greatly weakened Iran’s so-called Axis of Resistance. The fall of the Assad regime in Syria last month was the final nail in the axis’s coffin. Khamenei’s foreign policy now lies in ruins. Last year, for the first time in their history, Iran and Israel exchanged missile and drone attacks on each other’s territory. Following Raisi’s death in a helicopter crash in May, Khamenei allowed a reformist, Masoud Pezeshkian, to run for and win the presidency—a significant concession, as reformists have been effectively sidelined, if not barred, from national politics for nearly two decades. Now Rouhani’s star foreign minister, Javad Zarif, is back as Pezeshkian’s vice president for strategic affairs. Both Rouhani and Zarif campaigned for Pezeshkian and have found themselves on the winning team.
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