Iran's new president to be inaugurated amid stalled nuclear talks and hopes of Saudi detente

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

57% : Tehran, Iran (CNN)Ebrahim Raisi was set to be inaugurated as Iran's next president on Thursday, signaling the start of a new harder-line era that could herald major shifts in the Islamic Republic's policies at home and abroad.
56% : Raisi's inauguration comes at a pivotal time, with Iran currently in indirect negotiations with the United States over how to revive the 2015 nuclear agreement.
56% : While Rouhani was keen to open Iran up to foreign investment and attract companies from the West, Raisi subscribes to the notion of a "resistance economy," a model Iranian hardliners have been propagating for years.
52% : Iran will have "a foreign policy that is balanced with an eye towards all countries -- with a logical and at the same time strong discourse, a discourse that will be able to secure Iranian rights on all fronts," Amir-Abdollhian said.
50% : Tensions in the region are also high following a string of maritime provocations blamed by the West on Tehran.
50% : The Biden administration said it wants Iran to enter talks about its ballistic missile program and the country's "behavior" in the Middle East.
49% : At his first press conference as president-elect, Raisi said he foresaw a reopening of Iranian and Saudi embassies in Riyadh and Tehran.
45% : After eight years of Hassan Rouhani's moderate administration, Iran now turns to Raisi, an ultra-conservative judiciary chief whose views are fully in line with the thinking of the country's powerful clergy and Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the final say on all major matters of state.
45% : While Rouhani and millions of Iranians had hoped the landmark 2015 nuclear agreement (known as the JCPOA) would lead to a bonanza of foreign investment, those hopes were dashed by the Trump administration's exit from the deal and its unleashing of the "maximum pressure" campaign that hit Iran with tougher than ever sanctions that continue to cripple the economy to this day.
43% : Hossein Amir-Abdollhian, parliament's foreign affairs adviser and possibly the next foreign minister, told CNN in a recent interview that Iran does not plan to curtail its foreign policy.
41% : Despite Raisi's plans for a more self-sufficient economy, lifting at least some of the sanctions against Iran will be key as the incoming administration faces a struggling economy, a high unemployment rate and a currency that has been in near freefall, leading to a major spike in consumer prices.
38% : Tehran has shot down even the notion of any direct talks with Washington.
37% : Iran has recently been involved in talks with its main regional rival, Saudi Arabia, in a bid to end a long standoff that has contributed to instability in large parts of the Middle East.
35% : But while tensions between Iran and the US could further escalate, other conflicts might see at least some de-escalation.
31% : Negotiations are ongoing on how to bring the US back into the nuclear deal and Iran back into full compliance, after Tehran responded to Trump's sanctions by significantly ramping up both its stock and purity of enriched uranium in recent years.
24% : Dr. Seyyed Mostafa Koshcheshm, a political analyst in Tehran, says Rouhani's belief in improving relations with the West, even after the Trump administration started its maximum pressure campaign, may have been his biggest mistake. "

*Our bias meter rating uses data science including sentiment analysis, machine learning and our proprietary algorithm for determining biases in news articles. Bias scores are on a scale of -100% to 100% with higher negative scores being more liberal and higher positive scores being more conservative, and 0% being neutral. The rating is an independent analysis and is not affiliated nor sponsored by the news source or any other organization.