Why the Coming Iranian Elections Will Challenge the Biden Administration
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei seems inclined to promote a candidate who will quash dissent over someone who could work with the West.
Ebrahim Raisi speaks to his supporters in Tehran. (Photo graph by Majid Saeedi/Getty Images.)
In the past, the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader inevitably gave a speech before a presidential election extolling how the revolution welcomed variety among the men running for office. This was never true, of course: Ali Khamenei and his minions on the Guardian Council, which supervises elections, have always tried to prune off those who didn’t have the right stuff, especially if they might threaten the system. But there was some latitude. Men of revolutionary stature, sometimes equal to or greater than that of the supreme leader’s, could go at it. Sometimes Khamenei even made too-inclusive mistakes, as happened in 2009 when the pro-democracy Green Movement shook the country.
Kellner is a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe, where his research focuses on Brexit, populism, and electoral democracy. More >In a government report published in March, he said that this is vital for the UK’s “safety and prosperity,” and definitely not a “vainglorious gesture.”
All the while, the UK is busy negotiating new trade deals with other countries, now that the EU no longer does so on Britain’s behalf. And the UK remains a nuclear power within NATO, with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
That’s one side of the ledger. But it’s not the whole story. Here are some things that Johnson’s critics put on the other side:
Moonshot management
s+b Blogs
Today’s leaders can learn valuable lessons from James Webb, the NASA administrator who met John F. Kennedy’s lunar challenge.
Photograph by Jeremy Horner
NASA has set its sights on Mars. In April, the space agency flew a solar-powered drone on the red planet the first powered flight on another world. A month earlier, it successfully fired up the four engines of its most powerful rocket since the Apollo era. If the funding and political will can be sustained, this will be the rocket that lifts humans to Mars. James Edwin Webb would surely be delighted.
Modern Diplomacy
Published 1 week ago
Democracies have an inbuilt flaw when their own processes can be employed to undermine them. It is what has happened in Hungary in the last decade, and Hungary is not alone.
In his youth the current prime minister of Hungary, Viktor Orban, was an ardent dissident leading a youth movement, Fidesz, and in 1989 he was calling for the removal of Soviet troops and free democratic elections. Opposition to single-party socialist rule was eventually successful, and he was elected a Fidesz member of the National Assembly in 1990.
In 1998, his party won a plurality, and he served his first term as prime minister until 2002 when the socialists returned to power. However, a landslide victory in 2010 gave Orban a two-thirds supermajority, and with it the power to amend constitutional laws.