The only thing we learn from Iranian elections, to paraphrase George Bernard Shaw, is that we do not learn from Iranian elections. Despite their careful study of the tea leaves of Iranian domestic politics, neither the pundits nor the policymakers in the West could have imagined, even a day before the June 14 election, that Hassan Rouhani would win the polling. The same kind of monocausal analysis that blindsided the observers of Iran now risks creating misguided expectations about the implications of Rouhani's presidency.

To be fair, predicting the result of the election was no easy feat, and the confluence of factors that led to Rouhani’s upset victory will likely be debated for years to come. For at least four reasons, the deck appeared to be stacked against him.

First, the fortunes of the pragmatists and the reformists, the two political factions that strongly supported Rouhani, had precipitously declined after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad came to power in 2005. The 2008 and 2012 parliamentary elections and the disputed 2009 presidential election ushered in conservative forces. With their electoral victories facilitated by disqualifying rivals or tampering with the results, the ruling cabal appeared steadfast in guarding its political monopoly. The run up to this year’s poll seemed to follow the same pattern. Along with more than 670 candidates, the Council of Guardians, the body tasked with vetting candidate’s credentials, barred Rouhani’s mentor, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, from contesting the race. Likewise, many moderate and reformist aligned candidates who had registered for the local council elections, held in conjunction with the presidential poll, were disqualified and prevented from contesting councilor seats.   

Second, Rouhani’s track record as Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator (2003–2005) was torn asunder by almost all the major power brokers in Tehran. In May, Ali Bagheri, Iran’s current deputy nuclear negotiator, blasted Rouhani's confidence-building approach as “naïve and too compromising.” The reality is that Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s own statements had provided the green light for the current negotiating team to strike at its predecessor. In 2012, Khamenei said, “Regarding the nuclear issue, at a time when we cooperated with them and backed down — this really happened although we learnt a lesson from it — they advanced so much that I said in this room that if they continued like that, I would have to step in personally. And that was what I did. I had to step in.”