It was certain that victory in the election, under any conceivable scenario, would mark the end of the reformists in Iran. But the cabinet that has been introduced brought that ending to completion even before the new government had begun.

In truth, perhaps if Pezeshkian had shared his cabinet with his rivals before the election, Jalili might even have formed a coalition with him, Ghalibaf might have withdrawn in favour of that coalition, and there would have been no need to put people such as Dr Renani, Sharifi-Zarchi and several dozen others through the trouble of the Strategic Council and the humiliation of its outcome for both them and himself.

It is not that anything in this ruling political system can still surprise us, or that any hope of change remains, because it does not. But even if the president does not read Ferdowsi and does not remember him, that group of people who voted in hope will remember these eternal lines forever:

To raise the heads of the ignoble,
and hope for goodness from them,
is to lose the thread of one’s own path,
......