Iran set for modest change under Rowhani

  2013/6/17 source：China.org.cn

Moderate cleric Hassan Rowhani swept into office following the first round of voting in Iran's 11th presidential election, taking more than 50 percent of the vote according to the country's interior ministry. Rowhani's election will bring to an end the era of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's radical style of diplomacy and will usher in an era of moderate foreign policy, though the changes will likely not be substantial.
The West tends to regard Iran's political system as a product of a backward religious revolution. However, the Islamic Republic is not only "Islamic" but also a "republic" and since its founding, the debate has centered on the extent to which it should be both Islamic and a republic. This debate finally resulted in the departure of the conservatives and reformists and pragmatic conservatives, whom the West would like to label moderates while Iranians dub them centrists, stay in the middle. Hassan Rowhani is from the pragmatic conservative camp.
Since the late 1990s, pragmatic conservatives headed by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and reformists headed by Mohammad Khatami have been united in a political coalition to fight the conservatives, who control the country's major government institutions. Both the pragmatic conservatives and reformists attach great importance to improving Iran's economic situation as well as the country's relations with its neighbors and the West. This shared economic and foreign policy vision has laid the foundation for cooperation between the two sides.
The coalition has proved to be effective. Khatami's elections as president in 1997 and 2001 respectively were in no small part due to the support of Rafsanjani's pragmatic conservative faction. Despite the coalition's failure to bring Mir-Hossein Mousavi to presidential power in 2009, it has triumphed this time in propelling Rowhani to the presidency.