February 07 2020
Despite a pledge several weeks ago to allow more candidates to run for the Majlis, the Council of Guardians has done the reverse—even dumping more than one-third of the current Majlis deputies who filed to run for re-election, and who were fully vetted by the Council four years ago.
Analysts who looked over the list of rejects said that Reformists and moderates took the heaviest hits, although some conservatives were also left by the wayside.
Hamid Saberian, a Reformist activist, said 90 percent of the Reformists who registered across the country had been rejected. Hassan Raisuli, an election official for the Reform coalition, said there is virtually no competition for 158 of the 290 seats nationally.
Mahmud Sadeghi said only 20 Reformists had been approved for the 30 seats from Tehran, meaning the group could not mount a full-slate. That, however, happened four years ago and the Reformists managed to recruit a number of independents to fill all 30 slots. All the Reform endorsees won—but some turned out to be less than Reformists when it came to voting in the Majlis.
Of course, with 16,033 wannabees having registered, most of those rejected were unknowns who had walked into the registry office off the street and had little political activity to speak of.
The list of approved candidates numbers a little more than 5,000. So more than two-thirds were rejected. Four years ago, fewer than half were rejected.
There will still be plenty of candidates—an average of 17 for each of the 290 seats in the Majlis. But President Rohani was not impressed and made his irritation quite apparent.
He said it is not possible to run a country with just one faction in power.
“Do not tell the people that for every seat in the Majlis, there are 17, 170 or 1,700 candidates running in the election,” he said in a televised speech. “Seventeen hundred candidates from how many factions? Seventeen candidates from how many parties? From one party? This is not an election.”
He compared it to a store placing 1,000 copies of the same item on its shelves and telling customers they have a diverse selection to pick from. “People need diversity,” Rohani said.
Guardian Council spokesman Abbas-Ali Kadkhodai criticized Rohani’s remarks. In a tweet, he said that controversy around the vetting of candidates is nothing new, “but the president’s initiation of this anti-national project is regrettable.”
Kadkhodai needled the president: “Of course, I did not know that the disqualification of relatives means omitting other factions.” Rohani’s 34-year-old son-in-law, Kambiz Mehdizaleh, was among those barred from running in Tabriz.
The 12-man Guardian Council said that most of the incumbent deputies who were barred from re-election were disqualified due to “financial problems,” which means corruption. But none of them were convicted of any crimes.
Of 290 sitting deputies, 247 filed to run again; 92 of them or 37 percent were rejected.
Even Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani, who is retiring from politics, spoke out against the rejections. “Some of the lawmakers have been disqualified on the grounds that they have not demonstrated a practical commitment to the Islamic Republic. This is while I have been working with them on a daily basis for the past four years or even eight years. And I have not witnessed such a problem in most of these people.”
The best known of the incumbents disqualified is Ali Motahari, a one-time conservative who now often aligns himself with the Reformists, though he is probably best described as having an eclectic approach to policy. He has irritated the Supreme Leader, however, by repeatedly calling for Mehdi Karrubi and Mir-Hossain Musavi, the Reformist leaders long confined to home detention, to be either freed or put on trial. Motahari is the son of Ayatollah Morteza Motahari, who was assassinated May 1, 1979, and is considered one of the great martyrs of the revolution.
The son was elected to the Majlis in 2008, 2012 and 2016. He drew the second largest number of votes of any candidate in the country in 2016.
Other prominent deputies rejected by the Guardians include Elias Hazrati, Mahmud Sadeqi, Hossain Naghavi-Hossaini, Nader Ghazipur and Moham-mad-Reza Tabesh. Shahindokht Molaverdi was also rejected; she was until recently the vice president for women’s affairs and a vocal defender of women’s rights.
Many Reformist voters are carping on social media that the Reformists have long been so neutered by the regime that they cannot do anything in the Majlis and it is a waste of time to vote. It is true that the Reformists have not been able to pass much Reform legislation. But their presence has stopped the hardliners from passing hardline legislation—which will change if the many Reformists proposing to boycott the vote prevail.
According to a poll taken by the Iranian Students Polling Agency, 49 percent of the residents of Tehran—a Reformist bastion—have “absolutely no intention to vote.”
The elections will be held February 21. Candidates who were rejected were given five days to appeal and the final list of approved candidates will be released a week before the election.