Arash Azizi: “The Soviet despot Joseph Stalin once said that it is not the voters who matter most in elections but those who count the votes. When it comes to elections held in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the real power belongs to the small body of clerics and jurists called the Guardian Council, which vets every candidate and decides who gets to run. The council’s 12 members are directly or indirectly appointed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, an octogenarian who still calls all the most important shots.
On Sunday, the council presented the final slate of candidates for the presidential election to be held on June 28, following last month’s death in a helicopter accident of Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s hard-line president and Khamenei yes-man. Of the 80 current and former regime officials who registered to run, the council approved only six. The race will now be chiefly among two major conservative candidates and a lone reformist.
You can call them the technocrat, the fundamentalist, and the reformist, respectively: Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a former mayor and police chief, who is known for his strongman tendencies and base of support in the powerful militia Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC); Saeed Jalili, a former national-security adviser who is infamous for his Islamist fundamentalism, even by the regime’s standards; and Masud Pezeshkian, a member of Parliament, physician, and former health minister under President Mohammad Khatami. Because Pezeshkian was one of the three candidates endorsed by the Iranian Reformist Front, the reformists will now have to walk back their threat to boycott the vote.”
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Arash Azizi: “The Soviet despot Joseph Stalin once said that it is not the voters who matter most in elections but those who count the votes. When it comes to elections held in the Islamic Republic of Iran, the real power belongs to the small body of clerics and jurists called the Guardian Council, which vets every candidate and decides who gets to run. The council’s 12 members are directly or indirectly appointed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, an octogenarian who still calls all the most important shots.
On Sunday, the council presented the final slate of candidates for the presidential election to be held on June 28, following last month’s death in a helicopter accident of Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s hard-line president and Khamenei yes-man. Of the 80 current and former regime officials who registered to run, the council approved only six. The race will now be chiefly among two major conservative candidates and a lone reformist.
You can call them the technocrat, the fundamentalist, and the reformist, respectively: Parliamentary Speaker Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a former mayor and police chief, who is known for his strongman tendencies and base of support in the powerful militia Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC); Saeed Jalili, a former national-security adviser who is infamous for his Islamist fundamentalism, even by the regime’s standards; and Masud Pezeshkian, a member of Parliament, physician, and former health minister under President Mohammad Khatami. Because Pezeshkian was one of the three candidates endorsed by the Iranian Reformist Front, the reformists will now have to walk back their threat to boycott the vote.”
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