Leadership Quote by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani

Freedom is doing a lot of diplomatic labor here, less a moral absolute than a political instrument. Rafsanjani’s line arrives with the tidy symmetry of a statesman’s reassurance: what’s good for “the people” is also good for “us.” That parallel phrasing is the tell. It frames popular choice not as a risk to power but as a stabilizer of it, turning democratic language into a promise of managed consent.

Rafsanjani, a pragmatic operator in the Islamic Republic’s upper ranks, often spoke in the register of moderation: flexibility without surrender, reform without rupture. In that light, “when the people choose what they want” reads as conditional, even curated. It doesn’t specify what choices are on the ballot, who defines the field of acceptable options, or what happens when the public wants something that collides with clerical authority, security priorities, or revolutionary mythology. The sentence quietly presumes alignment: the people’s will and the regime’s interests can be made to converge, so long as the system remains the broker.

The intent feels two-directional. Internally, it soothes a population periodically mobilized and periodically constrained, suggesting that agency is compatible with the existing order. Externally, it offers a familiar vocabulary to an international audience hungry for signals of openness, implying that Iran’s political legitimacy has a participatory core.

What makes the quote work is its strategic vagueness: “freedom” as a banner, “choice” as a controlled mechanism, and “good for us” as the candid admission that the state’s stake is never absent.