Farideh Farhi

Hassan Rohani’s election victory took many commentators by surprise. But the call for a move towards the centre, for e‛tedal (‘moderation’), has been in the air in Iran for a couple of years. In fact, all but one of the six candidates on the ballot on election day would one way or another have tried to pull the country away from the highly polarising politics that have dominated since Ahmadinejad’s re-election in 2009, and the protests and harsh crackdown that followed. Still, there was nothing inevitable about the way Rohani was elected.