November 19, 2021
Gholam-Hossain Karbaschi, one of the leading figures of the tolerated opposition in the Islamic Republic, has been dumped as head of the Rafsanjaniite political party and replaced by a more leftist figure.
Karbaschi, now 67, was one of the founders of the Executives of Construction party in the 1990s. The party was formed to support the programs of then-President Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani. Karbaschi became chief of the party in 1996 and held the post until this month.
Karbaschi was one of the major figures trying to put brakes on hardliners in the 1990s, when he was mayor of Tehran. The hardliners then had him arrested for corruption. His trial was televised nationally and amounted to daily pyrotechnics between him and the judge, Gholam-Hossain Mohseni-Ejai, who is now the chairman of the Judiciary.
It appeared Karbaschi knew that he was about to be ousted as party chief. He did not attend the November 9 meeting of the party’s central committee that elected Hossain Marashi, a former party spokesman, to replace Karbaschi as party chief.
The party has been part of the Reformist movement ever since the presidency of Mohammad Khatami (1997-2005), but has always been viewed as the moderate wing of that movement. Some saw the replacement of Karbaschi by a more leftist figure as a sign of a general movement leftward among Reformists now that they have been eviscerated by the hardline regime and moved to the fringes of the political world. No prominent Reformist was allowed by the Council of Guardians to run in this year’s presidential election or last year’s Majlis elections.
According to the Reformist daily Arman, the party’s central committee voted unanimously to fire Karbaschi and replace him with Marashi, a relative of the late President Rafsanjani. Marashi led the party’s left wing throughout the past 25 years. The wing was identified with Rafsanjani’s outspoken daughter, Faezeh Hashemi, who has refused to take part in party meetings for several years to protest Karbaschi’s leadership.
IranWire said several key members of the party had quit during the past few years, but the drop in membership and the rift among members of the central committee had become more visible in the past two years, as dissatisfaction with Karbaschi’s handling of the Majlis and presidential elections in 2020 and 2021 annoyed many members an issue of political strategy, not how the party was oriented ideologically.
Meanwhile, a commentary in another Reformist daily, Etemad, characterized the ouster of Karbaschi as a sign of the party moving to the left and getting closer to the mainstream of the Reformist movement.
According to Sharq, another Reformist daily, some inactive members, including Akbar Torkan, a proreform figure with ties to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi, were present at the party’s central committee meeting. Some media outlets have taken this as a sign that the presence of trusted individuals like Torkan can strengthen the party’s position within the ruling establishment. If Khamenehi decides, as he did before, that the country needs two political wings, then the Executives of Construction could act as the acceptable Reformist wing.
IranWire said the shift to put Marashi in charge cements the Rafsanjani clan as key to the party. Rafsanjani’s son chairs the central committee and Faezeh Hashemi is now expected to return to the forefront of the party’s leadership.
According to the moderate website Rouydad24, under Karbaschi, during the past two years, the party lost its political impact in both local and national elections. The party’s candidate in the presidential election, Abdol-Nasser Hemmati, who was supported by only part of the party, badly lost the election. To make the situation even worse for Karbaschi, the website quoted Mohammad Atrianfar, a senior party member, as saying the party’s central committee did not meet during the past year, meaning it was Karbaschi and not the party that nominated Hemmati.
Hemmati came in third of the four candidates left on Election Day with just under 10 percent of the vote. The Reformist establishment did not campaign for him and Hemmati was just left swinging in the wind.
