Disagreement between Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani is likely to widen. Khamenei is making unrelenting efforts to restrict, and reduce the room of maneuver for the newly-reelected president before his second term starts in August 2017, while Rouhani is trying to use the popular base support he had in the May 19, 2017 elections. 

Khamenei even threatened to impeach Rouhani if his policies would heighten division and polarization in the Iranian society. The situation is reminiscent of the 1980s divisions during the war with Iraq. Then, Iran’s first president after the 1979  Revolution, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, was accused of heightening polarization and division and the Parliament held a vote of confidence, which he lost. As a result, Ayatollah Khomeini dismissed Bani Sadr who fled the country to France.

Within this context, Khamenei is attempting to exploit the current pressures being put on Iran, namely escalation by the US Administration of  President Donald Trump who, in statements delivered on June 16, 2017, described the the nuclear deal as a bad one that does not serve Washington’s interests, and said it allowed Iran to get what it wants. He promised to change that. Moreover, his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson noted that Washington’s policy towards Iran is “to work toward support of those elements inside of Iran that would lead to a peaceful transition of that government” in Iran. 

Khamenei’s view is that these pressures can reduce Rouhani’s ability to expand his powers using his landslide victory at the May 2017 elections which he won from the first round. Rouhani defeated Ebrahim Raisi, the conservative candidate and the head of the Astan-e Quds Razavi foundation whom Khamenei backed and sought to increase his chances in becoming the next supreme leader after Khamenei leaves the scene. 

However, Khamenei’s thinly-veiled threat that the “Bani Sadr scenario” would be carried out again appears to be facing no easy challenges at this current stage. These challenges include the positions of Khamenei and Rouhani within the Iranian regime, and the domestic and foreign crises swirling around Iran.

Significant Timing

Khamenei seeks to send across messages to Rouhani before the latter’s second presidential term begins in August 2017. One message is that any attempt by Rouhani to follow in the steps of his predecessors - Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mohammad Khatami and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad- who, during their second presidential terms, tried to expand their powers thus reducing the supreme leader’s authority, will be similarly doomed to failure. The message is especially meaningful given the extensive powers delegated by the constitution to Khamenei, including at the executive level, that empower him to block the president’s decisions and obstruct his political and economic programs, should the leader deem this necessary.

Moreover, Khamenei deliberately plays down the potential consequences of Rouhani’s landslide win in the presidential elections, while Khamenei also wants to ensure a boost is given to the radical and revolution-inspired mechanisms - on which the regime always relies to sustain its survival- if it senses a looming internal or external danger. This is evidenced in Khamenei's sharp criticism of the government’s cultural policy, especially that he emphasized that these policies should not be dissociated from bids by the government and the reformists to establish ties with the outside world and open up to Western culture. 

Within this context, Khamenei recently said that when the central apparatus responsible for the culture dossier malfunctions, the revolutionary forces will be free to fire at will. This highly-significant signal means that Khamenei wants to stress on the fact that he, through his subordinate establishments within the regime, has the power to put an end to policies pursued by the president and even adopt more powerful options, such as dismissing the president if he goes too far in challenging the powers of the supreme leader and influencing establishments, namely the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Pressures from the Fundamentalists

Hence, escalation by Khamenei, perhaps, should not be detached from similar hints from Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, the spokesman of the Guardian Council of the Constitution. On June 17, 2017, Kadkhodaei noted that the Council is authorized to nullify presidential elections' results especially after announcing that some government officials have been involved in some violations These include delayed ballot-casting in some regions, lack of ballots as well as illegal campaigning by one of the candidates,  which meant Rouhani in particular. 

Without a doubt, the fundamentalist conservatives, who control the Guardian Council of the Constitution and other influential institutions within the regime, seek to capitalize on Khamenei's escalation to put pressure on Rouhani before he forms his new government to coerce him to give key ministerial portfolios to fundamentalists during his second term. 

That is because the conservatives are afraid that Rouhani would exploit his win in the elections and his alliances with some conservative figures such as Ali Larijani, Speaker of the Consultative Assembly (Parliament) and his deputy Ali Motahari, to get approval for a government formation that includes key reformist and moderate figures. These figures whom the  the fundamentalists accuse of inciting “an internal strife”, a term they use to refer to the 2009 political crisis that hit Iran when protests erupted against the results of the 2009 Iranian presidential elections in which incumbent president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won a second term.

Multiple Obstacles

However, despite this, it can possibly be said that Khamenei's threat of another “Bani Sadr scenario” is facing no easy obstacles. For one, the current supreme leader does not have the same powerful status that former supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini had enjoyed in the first decade of the Iranian revolution. Khomeini's exceptional power enabled him to control all the regime’s institutions and deal with pressures generated by the escape of the first president of the republic, while the regime was in the middle of a long war with Iraq. Another obstacle is the fact that the recent elections revealed that President Rouhani does have a considerable a wide popular support base that Bani Sadr did not have in that era. 

Consequences of the crisis, that faced the regime in 2009 are still present to date due to its failure to carry out full containment, impose pressures on the regime and restrict its ability to repeat that scenario in which a president was ousted. The reason is that such a bid would push the regime to pursue options that can have no less serious repercussions, especially in light of the notable international community’s increasing interest in the expatriate Iranian opposition as well as Iranian different ethnicities. On top of that, Washington appears to be relying on the possibility of  bringing about change inside Iran, according to recent statements by U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson. 

Hence, it can possibly be concluded that threatening such a scenario reveals the severity of the crisis that faces the regime now, and that is due, in part, to the pressures emanating from Iran’s foreign adventures. These pressures have contributed towards shaping a regional-international approach against Iran’s intervention in the internal affairs of regional states, its support for terrorism as well as its role in destabilizing the Middle East.