December 23, 2016
The Islamic CoalitionParty, which is allied with the Tehran Bazaar merchants, has chosen Mostafa Mirsalim to be its candidate in the 2017 presidential elections, the daily Khorasan reported Sunday.
When formally announced, that will make Mirsalim, 69, the first candidate from the Prin-cipleist faction ready to challenge President Hassan Rohani for re-election. Rohani has not yet announced his plans, but few doubt he will run again.
The Principleists always try to agree on a single candidate to challenge the Reformists in presidential elections and in each Majlis constituency. But they have never succeeded in uniting behind a single candidate in the presidential contests.
Mirsalim became national police chief shortly after the revolution. In July 1980, then President Abol-Hassan Bani-Sadr nominated him for prime minister, but Bani-Sadr’s opponents blocked the nomination. For five years in the middle 1990s, Mirsalim was minister of culture and Islamic guidance under President Ali-Akbar Hashem-Rafsanjani.
Since 1997, Mirsalim has been one of the three dozen members of the Expediency Council, which puts him at the center of national policy making.
An engineer educated in France, Mirsalim teaches mechanical engineering at Amir Kabir University in Tehran.