In a clear challenge to regime hardliners, Masoud Pezeshkian, a reformist and cardiac surgeon, won Iran’s snap presidential election on July 5. The elections were called after President Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash on May 19. The runoff had been considered a tight race, but Pezeshkian won decisively with almost three million more votes than Saeed Jalili, a hardliner and former nuclear negotiator.
The Guardian Council approved only six out of 80 candidates from across the political spectrum who registered to run for president in Iran's June 28, 2024 presidential election. Two of the six candidates had previously been disqualified from running -- one of them twice. The unelected body of six clerics and six scholars cleared five conservatives and one reformist in 2024.
Iran will hold snap elections on June 28, 2024 after the death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash on May 19. The next president will inherit a daunting set of challenges. At home, the unpopular government faced persistent inflation, high unemployment, and discontent over the lack of personal freedoms. Iran was also isolated by Western powers for rampant human rights abuses, an accelerating nuclear program, and arming Russia with drones for the war in Ukraine.
On May 19, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and six other passengers and crew died in a helicopter crash. The aircraft went down in dense fog in a mountainous region of East Azerbaijan province in northwestern Iran. The officials were returning from the opening ceremony for a dam on the border with Azerbaijan. Less than 72 hours after Raisi’s death, the focus has turned to the political changes that come next with elections slated for June 28.
Sanctions have cast a long shadow on Iran’s economy, but they have not led to an economic collapse. Iran has managed to grow its overall economy by an average of 1.7 percent since the initial 2012 sanctions shock. But for ordinary Iranians, the government’s ability to “resist” sanctions for more than a decade represents a Pyrrhic victory.
Tensions soared between the Houthi militia in Yemen and the United States after Houthis seized the crew of a commercial shipping vessel on Nov. 19, 2023. Houthis launched attacks–using drones, missiles, and small boats–on commercial shipping and naval warships in the Red Sea, one of the world’s most important waterways for international commerce.
Since the early 21st century, the centerpiece of relations between Tehran and Beijing has been economic, largely based on trade in oil and consumer goods. China bought Iran’s oil to fuel industrialization, while it sold machinery, electronics, and appliances to Iran to expand its global marketplace. The relationship, however, has been lopsided.
Iran reported its first deaths from the new COVID-19 virus on February 19, 2020. It soon became one of the world’s early epicenters. The Health Ministry claimed that the disease had been spread by travelers between Iran’s holy city of Qom and China’s industrial center at Wuhan, where the coronavirus first broke out. The government initially rejected quarantines, which the Deputy Health Minister Iraj Harirchi said "belong to pre-WWI — to the plague, cholera, stuff like that."
On November 27, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, a prominent nuclear scientist, was assassinated in a roadside attack about 40 miles east of Tehran. Western and Israeli intelligence had long suspected that Fakhrizadeh was the father of Iran’s covert nuclear weapons program. He was often compared to J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the American atomic bomb. He kept a low profile for most of his career.
Tensions between Iran and the outside world have escalated since an attack on four tankers on May 12 near the Strait of Hormuz, which was followed by an attack on two more tankers on June 13. Both attacks occurred in the Gulf of Oman. The Persian Gulf flows through the Strait of Hormuz into the Gulf of Oman. On July 4, the British Royal Navy seized an Iranian tanker carrying oil to Syria. In what seemed like a response, Iranian vessels harassed a British tanker while entering the Strait of Hormuz on July 11.
