that enough deputies want to summon President Ahmadi-nejad and so he will be forced to appear for questioning.
No president has ever before been summoned for questioning, so this is seen as a major political blow to the president’s prestige. But Ahmadi-nejad made no complaints. He considers himself such a good talker that he likely expects to be able to use his appearance to good measure.
In fact, his aides said Ahmadi-nejad was eager to appear in the Majlis before the March 2 parliamentary elections, while the Majlis leadership spoke of him appearing in mid-March, when his televised repartee with deputies could not influence the election outcome.
What was most notable about the summons was that it was actually a repudiation of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenehi, who called on deputies to drop the summons idea a few months ago. The Supreme Leader is normally able to make his will hold with an explicit statement. But not always. In this case, the parliamentarians’ disgust with Ahmadi-nejad presumably outweighed their sense of loyalty to the Leader.
It does not, however, indicate any breakdown in regime authority; even under Ayatollah Khomeini in the days of revolutionary fervor in the 1980s, the Majlis periodically ignored the Leader and did its own thing. While it indicates no breakdown in authority, it points to the limitations on authority in a society that is highly individualistic and resistant to authority on principle.
Article 88 of the Constitution states that whenever one-fourth of the Majlis deputies sign on to a summons, the president must appear in the chamber within one month. With 290 members, that required 73 signers. Deputy Ali Motahari, the organizer of the drive to summon Ahmadi-nejad, had far more signatures when he started the drive back the spring. But the Majlis leadership would twist arms and gets deputies to withdraw their names. Motahari persisted.
Last fall, Khamenehi announced his opposition to the summons. He said he wanted the sniping to end and for the Majlis and government to get back to work.
Motahari paused for a few weeks, but soon went back to work again recruiting new signers and getting some of the old ones to put their names back on the summons. The leadership again twisted arms to get the numbers below 73. As of several weeks ago, however, Motahari had a solid 79 signers and the leadership’s arm-twisting was going nowhere.
On Tuesday, the leadership conceded that Motahari had won. It read out the summons and the list of signers in the chamber, making the summons official. The president has one month or until March 6 to appear. The Majlis is now in recess until after the March 2 elections but could theoretically be called back into session for the president’s appearance. The Majlis leadership made clear it wasn’t interested in that.
This command performance will only involve 10 questions listed in the summons. That should give Ahmadi-nejad plenty of time to work up fancy answers with quips and distracting comments, the president’s great skill.
There will be no vote of confidence after the questioning. To set up such a vote, the summons would have had to carry the signatures of one-third of he members, not one-fourth.
Motahari has already been punished for his recalcitrance. The organizers of the main conservative slate to run in the March 2 elections dropped him from their slate of candidates for the 30 Majlis seats in Tehran. Motahari swiftly started a rival slate that will challenge the mainstream candidates—and he could prove deadly in the capital as his slate is poised to be seen as the chief critic of the president. (See elections story on page ten.)
Motahari was given a boost from Grand Ayatollah Javad Fazel-Lankarani, a lecturer at the Qom Theological Seminary, who repudiated Khamenehi’s command to silence the Majlis.
Fazel-Lankarani was unusually blunt in a statement issued the day the Majlis leadership caved in. “Questioning the president will be beneficial,” he said. “If anyone opposes this move, it means they do not consider the Majlis to have the right to question the president.”
Of the 10 questions posed, four blatantly accuse the president of violating the law by ignoring Majlis mandates. Those questions ask: 1) why the president refused to spend appropriated funds to support Tehran’s Metro construction; 2) why he never used money saved from phasing out subsides to support businesses in trouble because of losing subsidies, which is required by the law; 3) why he waited five months to name a sports and youth minister when that ministry was created by the Majlis over Ahmadi-nejad’s objections in legislation that ordered the minister be named in 90 days; and 4) why the president failed to spend 15 trillion rials (about $1.5 billion at the time) appropriated in the 1389 (2010-11) budget for cultural affairs.
Another question asks why his government claimed economic growth of 4.5 percent in 1389 when the International Monetary Fund reported growth of 3.0 percent. (Actually, the World Bank figure for 2010 growth is 1.0 percent). And it asks how Ahmadi-nejad can claim to have generated 1.6 million jobs with such anemic growth.
Another question asks why he has questioned the enforcement of the dress code when that is national policy.
The remaining four questions were little more than political stabs at the president: 1) how can he justify his refusal for a week to accept Khamenehi’s reinstatement of Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi, who had been fired by the president; 2) why did he make a statement saying the Majlis was not on top of matters; 3) why does he decline to denounce the “deviating current,” the term used by his critics to describe the claque around Ahmadi-nejad; and 4) why did he damage the country‘s prestige and humiliate Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki by firing him while he was on an official trip to Senegal.