A bloc of 15 conservative groups has recently been formed with the goal of dominating the parliamentary elections, electing deputies who will obstruct President Ahmadi-nejad in 2012 and prevent the election in 2013 of any presidential candidate favored by Ahmadi-nejad. This bloc calls itself the Resistance Front. It is mainly resisting Ahmadi-nejad and his system of restricting authority to a small band of personal loyalists.
It appears now that the anti-Ahmadi-nejad faction will field a slate of candidates for most seats in the Majlis while Ahmadi-nejad will try to field a slate of his backers. The reformists are debating whether to field a slate or to boycott the balloting next march.
No candidate can get on the ballot unless approved by the Council of Guardians.
The Council is expected to vet a nearly full slate of anti-Ahmadi-nejad candidates. The key question may be whether the endorsing bloc can agree on one candidate in each district or ends up tied in knots with multiple candidates. The danger there is that they would divide the anti-Ahmadi-nejad vote and allow an opponent to win.
It isn’t known if the Council will approve a full slate of Ahmadi-nejad backers. Some expect it will only allow a partial slate with too few candidates to win a majority.
The same question arises for the reformists. Many expect the Council will allow only a token number on the ballot.
However, the Council may follow the tack it used four years ago. It then allowed reformists to run in almost every constituency. However, it kept all the best known and most popular reformists off the ballot and approved relative unknowns. It might well do the same thing in the coming months for the reformists and the pro-Ahmadi-nejad faction.
The reformists like to say they were defeated four years ago because they were kept off the ballot. But they weren’t kept off the ballot. It isn’t clear that they did so badly—electing only about 40 deputies to the 290-seat Majlis—because their candidates were little known or because the reformists were so discredited at that time.
Mohammad Javad-Haq-shenas, the former editor of the now-banned Etemad-e Melli, which was the voice of 2009 presidential candidate Mehdi Karrubi, says, “Reformists have not made a decision on whether to boycott the legislative elections.”
The core problem for the reformists is that they have not been much of a presence in the Majlis for the last few years. They have not offered an alternative vision to the electorate. The political landscape in the Majlis is dominated almost entirely by the pro- and anti-Ahmadi-nejad conflict.
