ANALYSIS | Trump ended dreams of reform in Iran. The country’s new hardline president is the proof

(CNN) – It must have been a spring day that most Iranians were looking forward to. The trees that line Tehran’s boulevards gleamed in the sun as a gentle breeze swept through the city. But on May 8, 2018, the residents of the capital prepared for a terrible change of fortune.President Donald Trump was about to announce the US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal. It signaled the beginning of an avalanche of sanctions that would practically crush Iran’s economy. It also shattered the dreams of the Iranians with a reformist mindset.

“What Trump is about to do is extend the life of the regime for another 30 years,” an elderly Iranian-American told CNN in the hours leading up to the speech. The Islamic Republic, established after the overthrow of the autocratic and staunch pro-Western Sha, was just months away from its 40th birthday. The nuclear agreement, on the other hand, seemed to constitute the gateway for reforms in the country.

In June 2017, the Iranians demonstrated en masse to re-elect President Hassan Rouhani in what was seen as a referendum on their historic agreement. The urgency to preserve the most significant opening of the island country to the west was palpable.

But Trump arrived. And the Iranians, who have arguably witnessed more dramatic political turns in the past seven decades than any other people, knew that the US president’s plans would backfire.

The so-called “maximum pressure” campaign would not achieve its stated goal of overthrowing Iran’s clergy. Rather it would shore it up. Skepticism towards the West, which constitutes the ideological core of the regime, would be underlined, highlighted and scrawled in frenzied circles.

Iran had kept its end of the bargain, as admitted by the State Department itself, but the United States withdrew anyway. The resulting sanctions led to a massive shortage of food and medicine, and plunged the country into a financial spiral. The European parties to the agreement were powerless to save it.

“We told him,” the Conservatives told the Iranians a thousand times.

Much has happened since then. In 2020, Trump ordered the operation that ended with the death of Iran’s most revered general, Qasem Soleimani, further enraging conservatives. His funeral was one of the largest in the history of the region. That same year, Trump lost the presidency in the elections. His successor, Joe Biden, acted immediately to restore the deal. The Iranian reformers thought, perhaps, that they could turn the clock back to May 2018.

But the response of the clerical power was a resounding “no”. Nowhere was it articulated more forcefully than in this week’s elections, which were designed to bring victory to the head of the ultra-conservative judiciary Ebrahim Raisi, the hardest-line president Iran has seen in decades.

Both the process and the outcome of the elections were exceptional in their cheekiness, even by Islamic Republic standards. The Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, he reaffirmed himself in his position. Iran’s political future would be even more micromanaged by ultra-conservative clergy.

But this election could have repercussions beyond the four or eight years that Raisi will be president. Raisi, a close associate of the ailing 81-year-old Khamenei, is becoming known as ayatollah, an honorary title that indicates high rank among Shiite Muslims. Khamenei currently holds that title. So did his predecessor and founder of the Islamic Republic, Ruhollah Khomeini. Images of Raisi with Khamenei invaded Tehran’s urban landscape in the run-up to the elections. Khamenei, people quietly recalled, was also president before ascending to supreme leadership.

The clerical elite, it seemed, were preparing the Raisi rite of passage to succeed Khamenei and occupy the highest office in the country.

This has upset many Iranians. It seemed that Khamenei had chosen to cement his legacy rather than the demands of the population for constitutional reform. The conservative Guardian Council, which selects presidential candidates, excluded Raisi’s serious rivals from the presidential race. As a result, turnout in the presidential elections was less than 50% for the first time in the history of the Islamic Republic.

To add insult to injury for the reformist camp, Raisi personifies the darkest aspects of the regime that the Iranians have suffered. Since two years ago, heads Iran’s harsh judiciary, which has one of the worst death penalty rates in the world and imposes long prison terms for some of the most subtle forms of dissent, such as protesting the mandatory wearing of the veil. In 1988, he was allegedly part of a death commission that secretly executed and forced the disappearance of thousands of political prisoners. For the rest of his career, he was a prominent prosecutor linked to multiple crackdowns on dissent.

The majority of Iranian voters did not vote for Raisi. But the clerical class chose to deal with public discontent rather than deal with Western fickleness. The cost of America’s unpredictability was tremendous. Iranians, under pressure from a faltering economy, have repeatedly protested in large numbers. The stakes were too high, and conservative clerics want to cut their losses.

The moderate politicians, who with the outgoing President Hassan Rouhani they enjoyed a popular mandate, they were badly damaged. The sanctions have put the government in a situation of failure, causing Iran’s negotiators and diplomats, such as the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Javad Zarif, appear weak. Meanwhile, hardliners have successfully presented themselves as survivors. They imposed themselves on America’s maximum pressure campaign, which its own architects, specifically former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, repeatedly called the most aggressive sanctions regime Iran has ever faced.

The message of Iran’s elections will resonate throughout the region: in these uncertain times, only autocrats can guarantee stability. Some of the biggest proponents of authoritarianism, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, were quick to congratulate Raisi on his victory.

Defenders of Middle Eastern regimes will argue that the growing gap between the region’s leaders and its people is less of a danger to states than the risk posed by clumsy Western interventionism.

Trump’s maximum pressure campaign is not historically unique in this regard. In 1953, the CIA orchestration of a coup that deposed the democratically elected and secular Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, laid the foundation for a longer pattern in many ways.

Today, once again, democracy in the troubled Middle East is more elusive than ever, even as discontent grows. The region has been repeatedly rocked by protests in favor of reform or democracy. But these are disorganized masses facing a much more organized and politically hardened elite. So it may be true, as our Iranian friend said, that it will take another 30 years for real change to occur.