Hassan Rohani: Iran’s president-elect

By Roula Khalaf and Najmeh Bozorgmehr

An accomplished diplomat and veteran of an unforgiving political environment

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The symbol of Hassan Rohani’s presidential campaign was the key he promised would unlock Iran’s problems. It was a source of ridicule when voters assumed the election outcome was sealed for a hardliner and the centrist cleric was mere decoration amid the stage management.

When his victory was announced on Saturday, however, it was greeted by an explosion of relief across the Islamic Republic. “The first lock has been opened,” a smiling Mr Rohani said at his Monday press conference.

Iranians danced in the streets for the first time since 2009, when the vote for an opposition reformist leader was rigged and the regime unleashed its thugs on protesters. When the national football team qualified for the 2014 World Cup days later, many said Mr Rohani had brought good luck.

The 65-year-old cleric is a clever enough politician to know popular expectation is running far ahead of his ability to deliver. Yet the consent of the conservative religious regime headed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei （哈梅内伊）to his election could, in itself, help turn the page on the 2009 vote. After eight years of President Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad’s provocative policies, many Iranians also see Mr Rohani’s ascent as a return to sanity.

Nonetheless, in a system in which the president’s powers are constrained, he will face pressures that could prove irreconcilable. His drive to open doors – whether creating jobs, fighting inflation or improving relations with the outside world – is bound to clash with the hardliners’ unbending attitude.

His challenge is to avoid the fate of Mohammad Khatami（哈塔米） who in 2005 left a trail of disillusion. It was during the reformist president’s two terms that Mr Rohani held his highest position during more than two decades on the Supreme National Security Council – the body that leads negotiations on the nuclear programme. As secretary, he persuaded Mr Khamenei to accept a 22-month suspension of the programme, the only nuclear deal ever struck with western powers.

People who know Mr Rohani say he is well suited to navigate Iran’s political minefield at a critical time, with the economy crippled by international sanctions and Israel threatening strikes on nuclear facilities. Despite his reformist label, he was not part of the movement seeking to reconcile the republic with democratic principles. He has spent much of his career in the security establishment. Reformist voters ensured his victory; but in the 1990s his role in quashing student dissent was questioned.

In fact, he belongs to the conservatives’ pragmatic centrist wing, represented by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani（拉夫桑贾尼）, a former president. Since the election, he has vowed to make the nuclear programme more transparent, to hold talks with world powers, to help ease sanctions “step by step”, and to boost the economy.

“He’s a calm, rational figure,” says Richard Dalton, the former British ambassador to Iran who dealt with Mr Rohani when he was chief nuclear negotiator. “He can see the other person’s point of view and doesn’t express himself in antagonistic way.”

Mr Rohani’s serenity was apparent from childhood, says his mother, Sakineh, who still lives in his home town of Sorkheh, 180km east of Tehran. He was born Hassan Fereidon in 1948, changing his last name when he became a cleric, to a family of farmers and carpet-weavers. His father, Asadollah, was poor but married into a wealthier family. Eventually he opened a spice shop, acting at times as a representative of the senior clergy in the Shia holy city of Qom.

Hassan, one of five children, was sent to a religious school. “He was intellectually superior to his classmates, and sometimes teachers would hand over their classes to him and he would teach,” a classmate told an Iranian news agency.

He attended a seminary, where he also learnt English and maths, paving the way for his enrolment at Tehran university’s law school. He later earned a doctorate in Glasgow, exploring the flexibility of Islamic law. Despite his clerical background, Mr Rohani prefers to be known as a technocrat, opting for the title of doctor rather than the religious hojjatol-islam(Islamic high priest). His multi-layered expertise has given him a more realistic approach to relations with the world than many Iranian leaders.

As an impoverished 21-year-old, he married his cousin, Sahebeh, with whom he had five children. One of their sons died in suspicious circumstances, though it is unclear whether it was a murder or suicide.

Like many religious-minded scholars before the 1979 revolution, Mr Rohani was drawn to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini（霍梅尼）. Heard mentioning the ayatollah in a Tehran mosque, he became a target of the last shah (Iranian King)’s dreaded intelligence service. He was forced to leave the country, eventually joining Khomeini in exile in Paris.

Mr Rohani is an insider: since the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, in which he played a strategic role in the military command, he has not been excluded from regime institutions. Unlike many reformist and centrist leaders before him, he still enjoys a relationship of trust with the supreme leader – even though Mr Khamenei bet on a rival candidate in the election.

Managing relations with Mr Khamenei will be crucial, requiring more of the diplomatic skill that he deployed during the campaign. Mr Rohani trod cautiously, appealing to the reformists without antagonising radicals in the regime. His emphasis was less on political freedom than on the outgoing government’s disastrous economic management and extremist foreign policy.

As word of his victory spread, his campaign tweeted that it was satisfied with the conduct of the vote and asked supporters not to celebrate before the official results were announced. When asked at his press conference whether he would fire many of those now in government, Mr Rohani responded: “I said I have a key, not an axe.”

The writers are Middle East editor and Tehran correspondent respectively