Iranian Egypt's Guardian Council on Sunday approved the country's hardline parliament speaker and five others to run in the June 28 presidential election following a helicopter crash that killed President Ibrahim Raisi and seven others.
The Security Council again banned former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a radical populist known for his repressive actions after his disputed re-election in 2009, from running.
The committee's decision marks the start of a two-week election campaign to select a successor to Raisi, a hard-line protégé of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who was once considered a potential successor to the Iranian leader.
The selection of candidates, approved by the Guardian Council, a panel of clerics and jurists over whom Khamenei ultimately oversees, shows Iran’s Shiite theocracy wants a smooth run in an election that has seen record low turnout recently and where tensions remain high over Iran’s fast-moving nuclear program and the conflict between Israel and Hamas.
The Guardian Council also continued its practice of not accepting women or anyone calling for radical changes to the country’s governance.
The campaign is likely to include live televised debates on Iran's state-run television. Candidates will also put up billboard ads and give campaign speeches to support their candidacy.
So far, none of them have offered any specifics, but all have pledged to improve economic conditions in Iran, which is under sanctions from the United States and other Western powers over its nuclear program and has enriched uranium closer to weapons-grade levels than ever before.
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Such matters of state still rest with Khamenei, but past presidents have tended to favor either engagement or confrontation with the West.
The most prominent candidate remains Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, 62, a former mayor of Tehran with close ties to Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guards. However, many remember Qalibaf as a former Revolutionary Guards general who was involved in a violent crackdown on Iranian university students in 1999. He also reportedly ordered the shooting of students in 2003 while serving as Iran’s police chief.
Qalibaf ran for president in 2005 and 2013 but lost. He withdrew from the 2017 presidential race and supported Raisi, who ran for president for the first time and lost. Raisi won the 2021 election, which had the lowest turnout in Iran's history as all major opponents were disqualified.
Khamenei gave a speech last week suggesting that the qualities highlighted by Qalibaf’s supporters could be a sign of the Supreme Leader’s support for the speaker.
Yet Qalibaf’s role in the crackdown may be viewed differently after years of unrest in Iran, including over the country’s ailing economy and mass protests sparked in 2022 by the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who died after being arrested for allegedly not wearing a headscarf as security forces wished.
Other candidates include Saeed Jalili, a former senior nuclear negotiator who ran in 2013 and registered to run in 2021 before dropping out and endorsing Raisi.
Tehran Mayor Alireza Zakani also quit politics in 2021 and supported Raisi.
Mustafa Pourmohammadi was previously the Minister of Justice. Raisi's Vice President Amir Hossein Ghazizad Hashemi participated in the 2021 presidential election and came in last with less than a million votes.
Masoud Pezeshkian is the only reformist candidate among a host of hard-line candidates, but his chances of being elected are considered slim.
The Guardian Council disqualified former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a radical who questioned the massacre. As his term neared its end, Ahmadinejad's challenge to Khamenei intensified, as he was remembered for his bloody crackdown on Green Movement protests in 2009. The Guardian Council also disqualified him from running in the last election.
Iran also banned former parliament speaker Ali Larijani, a conservative figure close to former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, from running for the second time in a row.
Abdolnasser Hemmati, a former Iranian central bank governor who was running in the 2021 election, and Eshaq Jahangiri, who served as vice president in the government of moderate President Hassan Rouhani, were also disqualified.
The election comes at a time of tension between Iran and the West over Iran's supply of weapons to Russia to aid its war in Ukraine. Iran's support for proxy militias across the Middle East has become a growing focus as Yemen's Houthi rebels attack ships in the Red Sea over the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
On May 19, a helicopter crashed in northwestern Iran, killing Raisi, Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amirabdollahian and others on board. The investigation is still ongoing, but authorities said there was no indication that the crash on a cloud-covered mountainside was caused by human error.
Raisi is the second Iranian president to die in office. In 1981, President Mohammad Ali Rajai was killed in a bomb blast during the chaos following Iran's Islamic Revolution.
© 2024 The Canadian Press
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