Saeed Jalili, a hard-line former negotiator known as a ‘true believer,’ seeks Iran’s presidency

Dubai, United Arab Emirates — Hardline Iranian presidential candidate Saeed Jalili may have been Tehran’s chief nuclear negotiator for years, but he drew no applause from Western diplomats sitting across the table as he repeatedly lectured them about everything without offering anything.

“As the weaving of Iranian carpets advances in a millimetric, precise, delicate and lasting manner, God willing, this diplomatic process will also develop in the same way,” Jalili said then.

Those hours of conferences in 2008 paralyzed talks as hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei advanced the country’s nuclear program. That put pressure on the West that eventually eased with Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, which lifted sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

Now Jalili, 58, is on the verge of being elected Iran’s next president as he faces a runoff on Friday against little-known reformer Masoud Pezeshkian, a heart surgeon. Given that Iran’s nuclear program enriches uranium to near weapons-grade levels, a Jalili victory could re-freeze already stalled negotiations.

Meanwhile, Jalili’s own hardline vision for Iran, derided by his opponents as being Taliban-style, risks potentially inflaming a public still angry after the bloody crackdown by security forces that followed. the death protests of 2022. Mahsa Amini. She died in police custody after being detained for allegedly improperly wearing the mandatory headscarf, or hijab.

Jalili, known for his white hair and beard, is known as the “Living Martyr” after losing his right leg in combat at the age of 21 during the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. He was born on September 6 1965 in the Shiite holy city of Mashhad, his Kurdish father, a French teacher and school director, and his Azeri mother.

Jalili worked as a university professor with a PhD before joining Iran’s Foreign Ministry, rising to a senior position before joining Iran’s Supreme National Security Council and becoming the country’s chief nuclear negotiator under Ahmadinejad from 2007 to 2013. .

He made an immediate impression on his Western counterparts, with then-negotiator and now CIA director William Burns calling him “a true believer in the Iranian revolution.”

“He could be surprisingly opaque when he wanted to avoid direct answers, and this was certainly one of those occasions,” Burns recalled at one meeting. “At one point he mentioned that he still taught part-time at the University of Tehran. He did not envy his students.”

An anonymous French diplomat quoted at the time referred to a Jalili round of negotiations as a “disaster.”

Another European Union diplomat offered a similar assessment in a 2008 US diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks.

“An EU official who attended Jalili’s public and private meetings that day was struck by his apparent inability or unwillingness to deviate from the same presentation or provide nuance, calling him ‘a true product of the Iranian revolution,'” the cable said, without naming him. the diplomat

Jalili would later be replaced after coming a distant third in Iran’s 2013 presidential election, behind relatively moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani, himself a former nuclear negotiator. Rouhani’s administration would secure the 2015 nuclear deal, in which Iran sharply reduced the size and purity of its enriched uranium stockpile in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.

Jalili strongly opposed the deal and formed what he described as a “shadow government” during the Rouhani years to try to undermine its efforts. Jalili was also endorsed in his 2013 campaign by the hardline late Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, who once wrote that Iran should not deprive itself of the right to produce “special weapons,” a veiled reference to nuclear weapons.

Iran has long insisted that its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes.

However, U.N. inspectors and Western nations say Iran had an organized military nuclear program until 2003. In recent months, Iranian officials have made increasing threats about Iran’s ability to build a bomb if it wanted to, while enriching uranium up to 60% purity, a short period of time. technical step to 90% weapons grade levels.

Meanwhile, Pezeshkian’s defenders have described Jalili as potentially adopting hardline policies similar to those of the Taliban if elected, something Jalili acknowledged in passing.

“Before the election results were even announced, were we calling 10 million or 9 million people Taliban?” Jalili said in a recent debate, referring to reformists’ criticism of his policies. “This helps?”

Jalili has offered no real comment on how she would handle the current dispute over the hijab in Iranian society. But those in Jalili’s campaign have been much more direct, calling for stricter punishments against those who refuse to wear the mandatory veil. Someone once referred to uncovered women as worse than a “whore.” However, throughout his campaign, Jalili has been vague about how he would enforce the law and even posed for a selfie with a woman in a loose hijab, a moment captured in a news photograph.

Jalili has also received backing from another fundamentalist ayatollah, Mohammad Mehdi Mirbagheri, who belongs to the Islamic Revolution Stability Front, the far-right end of hardliners in the nation. The group, which supports Jalili, was behind a bill passed by parliament of iran which could impose sentences of 10 years in prison for hijab violations. It must still be approved by the country’s Guardian Council, a panel of clerics and jurists ultimately overseen by Khamenei.

“They want lockdowns and closures on everything, regardless of the field,” political analyst Mehrdad Khadir told The Associated Press. “It’s the same when it comes to the issue of women, the Internet or any other issue.”

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Vahdat reported from Tehran, Iran. Nasser Karimi and Mehdi Fattahi in Tehran contributed to this report.