Ahmadinejad to appeal ally's removal from Iran's presidential race
Even if Ayatollah Khamenei approves the candidacy of President Ahmadinejad's preferred successor, the disqualification of two top candidates has already damaged the election's legitimacy.
Even if Ayatollah Khamenei approves the candidacy of President Ahmadinejad's preferred successor, the disqualification of two top candidates has already damaged the election's legitimacy.
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Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says he will seek the reinstatement of his ally's candidacy in next month's presidential elections by appealing to Iran's supreme leader, the only official with the power to overturn the ban issued yesterday by the country's Guardian Council.
Iran's state-owned Press TV reports that Mr. Ahmadinejad said he will ask Ayatollah Khamenei to approve by decree the candidacy of his former chief of staff Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei. Ahmadinejad, who cannot run for a third term under Iranian law, has publicly backed Mr. Mashaei as his political heir. But Iran's Guardian Council, which must approve all presidential candidates, decided against letting Mashaei run.
While the Council's decisions are technically not subject to appeal, the supreme leader is able to approve a candidate for election by decree.
But Reuters writes that observers are skeptical that Khamenei will do so, given that he likely had a hand in barring Mashaei and the Guardian Council's other prominent barred candidate, former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
The disqualification of Mr. Rafsanjani was a surprise, 海角大神 reports, given his political prominence and ties to the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Allowing Rafsanjani and Mashaei to run would have boosted the legitimacy of the election, writes Meir Javedanfar in an analysis for Al-Monitor. But for Iran's conservative leaders, stability is聽even more important than legitimacy,聽and "The rewards of allowing Meshai and Rafsanjani to run simply do not seem to have justified the high cost, as both would most likely have publicly questioned policies directly involving the domain of the supreme leader," Mr. Javedanfar writes.
The Guardian Council's decision means that Iran's next president will be "drawn from a slate of conservative candidates in Iran鈥檚 ruling camp, a loose alliance of Shiite Muslim clerics and Revolutionary Guard commanders," reports The New York Times. "That would put the last major state institution under their control 鈥� the first time since the 1979 revolution that all state institutions were under the firm control of one faction."
One of the frontrunners in the race is Saeed Jalili, Iran's lead negotiator in nuclear talks with the international community. The Monitor's Scott Peterson profiled him yesterday.