Iran officially has a president-elect, Ebrahim Raisi, who will be sworn in Thursday. Raisi replaces outgoing President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate first elected in 2013 to succeed Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, the hardliner who first came to many Americans' attention in 2007. That's when he spoke at Columbia University, expressing skepticism of the history of the Holocaust and insisting Iran doesn't "have homosexuals." On the scale of Rouhani to Ahmedinejad, Raisi is closer to the latter.
His distance from Rouhani is particularly important on the subject of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), commonly known as the Iran nuclear deal. Rouhani presided over the deal's creation during the Obama administration and attempted to negotiate with the Trump and Biden administrations to restore U.S. participation in the pact after then-President Donald Trump withdrew in 2018. Raisi — who is personally sanctioned by Washington for his alleged involvement in the execution of thousands of political prisoners in the late 1980s — says he'll negotiate, too, but he's expected to be comparatively uncompromising.
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