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“Wisdom tells us both countries need to think more about the future and try to sit down and find solutions to past issues and rectify things,” Rouhani, who takes office in August, said during his first press conference today. “There is a fresh opportunity for interaction on the global level.”
USIP’s Iran Primer web site has extensive excerpts from the press briefing, in which the new president, succeeding Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also addresses the conflict in Syria, the Iranian economy and domestic policy. The site also has video of the announcement and the celebrations, the reactions the news elicited at home and abroad and an analysis of what the win means by Shaul Bakhash, the Clarence Robinson professor of history at George Mason University.
Blaring car horns, improvised confetti and jubilant chants in the streets of the southwestern Iranian city of Shiraz greeted the news that Rouhani, the lone reformist candidate, captured a surprising majority -- 50.7 percent of the vote. In doing so, he avoided the need for a runoff that observers thought would be necessary, considering that six candidates were vying for the post.
The result of the presidential election “represents a significant shift in the Iranian political landscape,” Bakhash writes. Rouhani’s victory “was a reaffirmation by a majority of Iranians of the desire for a more moderate, more sensible course in both domestic and foreign policy.”
Rouhani managed to appear “as steadfast as the other candidates” on Iran’s right to develop nuclear energy, but he also talked about the need to break the impasse in negotiations with the U.S. and its partners in the talks and to extract Iran from its diplomatic isolation, Bakhash says.
Viola Gienger is a senior writer at USIP.
