First-round results from the French legislative election are mostly final (see my preview here), but it’s worth taking a day to digest them before attempting some interpretation. As I hope I made clear on Saturday, the important thing at this stage is not so much the raw numbers but the tactical decisions that the different parties make before next Sunday’s second round. If you can cope with basic French, Le Monde’s rolling coverage is the best place to follow what’s happening.
Instead, let’s look at another first round: Iran’s presidential election, held on Friday (previewed briefly last week), failed to deliver a majority to any candidate for only the second time ever. In contrast to France, where turnout was up sharply, Iran’s turnout was a miserable 39.9% – reflecting, no doubt, the electorate’s understanding that the game is fixed and that the control of supreme leader Ali Khamenei will not be threatened by whoever is president.
The first time a runoff was required was in 2005, on the retirement of reformist leader Mohammad Khatami. A very open field saw former president and relative moderate Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani lead with only 22.0%, ahead of conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on 20.3% and three other candidates in the teens. But Ahmadinejad beat Rafsanjani easily in the second round, winning with 63.2%.
This time the field is much smaller, but again a relative moderate has a narrow lead: Masoud Pezeshkian won 44.4% of the vote, about a million votes ahead of hardliner Saeed Jalili on 40.4%. Another hardliner and former candidate, Mohammad Ghalibaf, was well back with 14.4%. Pezeshkian and Jalili will contest the runoff this coming Friday.
The natural expectation is that Ghalibaf’s voters will mostly follow him in backing Jalili and he will win fairly comfortably – and the regime has shown itself quite capable of manufacturing a favorable result even if it’s not there to start with. But with a moderate in the lead, even one deeply complicit with the regime, some of the 60% who stayed home on Friday may well turn out to support him.
Certainly moderates have shown a surprising capacity for victory in the past: Khatami twice won landslide majorities, and Hassan Rouhani was an unexpected winner on Ahmadinejad’s retirement in 2013. Neither was able to accomplish much, and if Pezeshkian manages to sneak in his prospects won’t be any better.
Nonetheless, with the succession to Khamenei (who is 85) an increasingly pressing issue, this may be the reformers’ best chance to ensure that the path of peaceful evolution remains open.
The World is Not Enough 
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