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THE GUARDIAN-
By: Saeed Kamali Dehghan
Conservatives face concerted effort by moderates to deny them places in the parliament and Assembly of Experts as election campaigns begin this week
The struggle to shake up a decade of conservative dominance over Iran’s two major political institutions is set to kick off in earnest on Thursday, when candidates are officially allowed to begin their week-long campaigns before two important elections.
Iran’s interior ministry on Tuesday finalised the full list of approved candidates for the next parliamentary election, due on 26 February, after the Guardian Council blocked a significant number of reformist contenders during the vetting process.
On the same day, Iran will also hold the election for the next Assembly of Experts, an influential clerical body in charge of appointing the supreme leader. Both elections are a battleground between hardliners already in power and moderate and pro-reform figures seeking a comeback.
The outcome will have significant consequences for the president, Hassan Rouhani, in the remaining two years of his term and will affect his chances of seeking re-election next year.
Despite widespread disqualifications, reformists are pulling out all the stops to make sure fewer hardliners will enter the next parliament, or Majlis, according to Mohammadreza Jalaeipour, an Iranian reformist political activist now at Harvard University.
“Reformists from all different parties have put aside their differences after many years to agree on a joint list of candidates in an unprecedented form of coalition aimed at blocking hardliners from entering the parliament,” he told the Guardian.
The reformists’ patron is former president Mohammad Khatami, who faces restrictions on his movement and activities but is leading from behind the scenes.
In Tehran, the reformists on Tuesday issued their joint list of 30 candidates they want to enter the Majlis from the capital. It is led by Mohammad Reza Aref, an influential reformist figure whose decision to stand down in the 2013 presidential election in favour of Rouhani was crucial in the moderate figure’s victory.
Also on the list is Ali Motahari, the parliament’s sole current outspoken MP – a rare conservative figure who is also critical of the ruling establishment.
Jalaeipour said the big challenge facing the reformers is persuading people to turn out and vote. “There have been a lot of disqualifications but they haven’t purged all the reformists. The ultimate aim for moderates is to have fewer hardliners in the next parliament.”
Although initial reports suggest that as few as 100 reformist candidates are among the 6,000 approved for the parliamentary elections by the Guardian Council, it is believed that some pro-reform figures may have been spared from disqualification because their allegiance has been unclear.
More than 51% of those who registered for the parliamentary elections have been disqualified.
It is unclear how many women are standing for election to the Majlis, but currently only nine out of 290 members are female. This is unlikely to increase beyond 5%, according toMajlis Monitor, a parliamentary monitoring initiative supported byASL19 and the University of Toronto.
The Assembly of Experts is equally important. “This is the first time since the 1979 Islamic revolution that the Assembly of Experts election, usually a lacklustre event, is attracting huge attention internally,” said Majlis Monitor’s Farhad Souzanchi.
“Because of the age of the supreme leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] – he is 76 – and because the assembly lasts for eight years, it is very likely that the people who get into the assembly in this election will choose the next supreme leader, or the new leader himself may well be among those elected.”
According to Souzanchi, there is little or no sign of an organised boycott of elections in Iran, in spite of the disqualifications.
“It doesn’t look like people think a boycott is a viable solution at the moment,” he said. “When a lot of people boycotted under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, hardliners easily dominated the Majlis, which affected everyone.
“Now, although there are not many reformist candidates, people are trying to at least block extremists from entering both bodies.”
The Guardian Council’s filtering of the candidates has not stopped polls being competitive. In 2013 Rouhani, an approved candidate, created an extraordinary momentum for change and was elected on a mandate considered at home and abroad to be legitimate.
From more than 800 Islamic theologians who registered for the Assembly of Experts, only 161 were approved for the 88-member body. This initially meant that in six provinces, one candidate was standing unopposed, but an election official has since indicated that candidates have been moved to rectify the issue.
No women have been allowed to stand. Rouhani is himself a candidate for the assembly and his name is on a list of moderates along with a former reformist president, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
According to Hossein Bastani of BBC Persian, if fewer than half of those who voted for Rouhani in 2013 vote for a list of 16 moderate-leaning candidates in Tehran, the three main ultra-conservative leaders – Ahmad Jannati, Mohammad Yazdi and Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi – will automatically be blocked.
