Many questions over the election of Hassan Rouhani as the eleventh president of the Islamic Republic of Iran remain. One of the most interesting is how it is that following the 2009 Iranian presidential election, which many perceive as having been fraudulent, the regime allowed what appears to have been the relatively free and fair election (by Iranian standards) of the Centrist Rouhani, whose political current was being marginalized by Principalists just weeks before the election. As we argued in our first post-election article, most signs appeared to point to a Principalist win. Rouhani’s victory in the first round thus came as a shock to many Iran observers [...]
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