Experts on Monday downplayed hopes of any breakthrough in upcoming nuclear talks with Iran, cautioning that progress is unlikely before Iranian elections or while the Syrian conflict rages.
Negotiators from Iran and the five world powers are due to meet in Almaty, Kazakhstan, on Friday and Saturday for a new round of talks on the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme.
But former EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, who was the West’s main negotiator with Iran from 2003 to 2009, cautioned the Iranian leadership is preoccupied by the looming presidential elections in June.
“It will be very difficult to get something going before those elections,” he told a debate at the Brookings Institution think-tank.
Iranian negotiator Saeed Jalili will attend the new talks with counterparts from the P5+1 group of Britain, China, France, Germany, Russia and the United States arranged at the last meeting in the Kazakh capital in February.
But Solana said Jalili “doesn’t have to my mind the capacity to negotiate.”
“He’s just somebody who will tell you what he has received, he doesn’t have the flexibility to go into real negotiations,” Solana said, stressing that supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is the man pulling the strings.