Iran holds the second round of its presidential election on Friday (5), called after the death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in May, along with seven other people.
In the dispute are the radical Saeed Jalili and Masoud Pezeshkian, who is considered a “reformist”, a label that does not reflect the truth.
Although Iran holds elections, the country is far from being a democracy: candidates for any elected office in the country must be approved by the Guardian Council, a 12-member body, six of which are “experts in Islamic law” selected by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The others are jurists elected by the Iranian Parliament from among names nominated by the head of the Judiciary, who is also nominated by the Supreme Leader. In other words, in practice, only names not vetoed by Khamenei can run – so Pezeshkian will in no way represent a real change in the Iranian theocracy if elected.
A recent report on the website of the London-based International Iran channel, which produces content in Persian, highlighted that his candidacy may be a strategy by the Iranian regime to sell the impression that there is a real political dispute and thus encourage voter turnout.
So far, it hasn’t worked: in the first round, held last Friday (28), only 39.9% of voters went to the polls, the lowest turnout in a presidential election since the Islamic Republic of Iran was created in 1979, highlighting the apathy of the electorate in the face of the regime’s growing repression, the economic crisis and the prospect that the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip will spread throughout the Middle East.
Masoud Pezeshkian, despite being marketed as a “moderate”, supported a bill in the Iranian Parliament in 2010 to encourage women who disregard the rules on wearing the hijab (the Islamic veil) to be “shamed” in public.
In 2022, when the Islamic regime violently cracked down on protests following the death of a young woman who defied such norms, Pezeshkian said the demonstrations were “orchestrated acts of aggression” influenced by the United States and Europe.
Saeed Jalili, at least, is an outspoken radical. He served in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and lost part of his right leg to shrapnel during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war.
Jalili is close to Khamenei, who appointed him to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, and was deputy foreign minister for Europe and America during Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency (2005-2013).
During the Ahmadinejad government, he was the head of the Iranian side in the nuclear deal negotiations with the West, but he only hindered the talks with ideological slogans and then opposed the agreement, signed in 2015 and which would be broken in 2018.
With these two candidates, and since Khamenei is the one who really rules in Iran, nothing should change in the country of the ayatollahs, regardless of who wins the polls.
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