Iran’s theocratic Guardian Council on Sunday announced six candidates have been approved to run for the emergency election on June 28 to replace President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash on May 19.
The Guardian Council disqualified several prominent candidates, including former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and former parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani, both of whom would probably have been serious contenders if they were allowed to run.
The Guardian Council is a board of high-ranking Shiite Muslim clerics that disqualifies almost everyone who runs for high office in the secular wing of Iranian government, effectively ensuring that Iran’s farcical “elections” are rigged in advance.
More than 80 candidates met the June 3 registration deadline for the upcoming special election, but the Guardian Council only approved six. The approved candidates will now have about two weeks to campaign.
All six of the approved candidates were male. They included “hardliner” Saeed Jalili, who currently serves as a representative for Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei; sitting parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf; Tehran mayor Alireza Zakani; former interior minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi; current vice president Amir-Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi; and a lone “reformist” candidate, lawmaker Masoud Pezeshkian.
Four women were among the 80-plus applicants to run in 2024, but like every female presidential candidate since 1979, they were all disqualified.
Qalibaf, 62, is the favorite coming out of the gate, with a resume including mayor of Tehran and a stint in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the theocratic wing of the Iranian military and a designated terrorist organization.
Qalibaf oversaw violent crackdowns against student demonstrators in 1999 and 2003, which could cause him problems with the electorate after the brutal crackdown on the Mahsa Amini uprising in 2022.
Of course, the electorate’s feelings do not matter that much in a rigged election staged by an authoritarian government, so forcing Qalibaf down their throats could be a way for the regime to intimidate its subjects and remind them dissent will be punished harshly. The former police chief who ordered his forces to gun down university students could be expected to come down hard on future protests.
Qalibaf also has a long track record of losing presidential elections – he ran in 2005, 2013, and 2017, dropping out of the latter race to support Ebrahim Raisi, who lost. Raisi eventually “won” the 2021 election, albeit with the lowest turnout since the Islamic revolution in 1979.
The theocracy disqualified everyone running against Raisi in 2021, so it is not difficult to see why Iranians did not find the one-man “race” terribly interesting. Similar methods could be used to install Qalibaf if the regime really wants him in office. Some observers thought it was odd that Qalibaf registered for a presidential run because he was just reelected as parliament speaker in late May, so he might be in the race because he knows the regime wants him to win.
All of the other candidates are various flavors of “hardliner,” friendly to Khamanei’s policies and supportive of his Islamist theocracy, except for Pezeshkian, a dark-horse candidate presumably added to the final six to provide an illusion of choice. The Guardian Council disqualified other “moderate” candidates with more impressive credentials, including former vice president Eshaq Jahangiri and former central bank chief Abdolnaser Hemmati.
Pezeshkian, 69, is a combative former health minister and cardiac surgeon who rose to prominence during a factional struggle in the early 2000s. He spoke out against brutal crackdowns, advising the regime not to “kill people like wild animals.” He ran for president in 2013 and 2021, but did not poll well in either race.
Soon after he announced his candidacy in early June, Pezeshkian drew the support of Mohammad Javad Zarif, former foreign minister and one of the architects of the 2015 nuclear deal. Zarif and the president he served, Hassan Rouhani, are what passes for “moderate” leaders in Iran.
Zarif posted his support for Pezeshkian on Twitter using the hashtag #For-Iran, the slogan of Pezeshkian’s campaign. Pezeshkian has suggested he would restore Zarif as foreign minister – the position is currently open, as Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian died in the same helicopter crash as Raisi – although he was evasive in his reply when a reporter asked yesterday if Zarif would be part of his prospective government.
Amir-Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi is also a medical doctor, appointed “Vice-President and Head of the Martyrs and Veterans Affairs Foundation” by Raisi in 2021. He is younger than most of the other candidates at 53. He comes from a family of diehard Islamist revolutionaries and served in the Iran-Iraq War.
Hashemi was polling in fourth place during the 2021 election before he dropped out to support Raisi and is running as his successor, although he also promises to reform Iran’s hidebound bureaucracy and reach out to younger voters.
Saeed Jalili was formerly among Iran’s top nuclear negotiators and has run for president twice before. He is arguably the hardest “hardliner” among the six candidates, a longtime ally and assistant of Supreme Leader Khamenei and the late President Raisi.
Jalili is a strident anti-American ideologue, strongly opposed to engaging with Western powers. Like Raisi, he belongs to the “Principalist” school of Iranian politics, meaning devotion to the principles of the 1979 revolution. His slogan during one of his previous runs for the presidency was “Great Jihad for Iran’s Leap Forward.”
Jalili’s intransigence as a nuclear “negotiator” prompted several resolutions against Iran at the U.N. Security Council and the IAEA, the U.N.’s nuclear watchdog agency. In the eyes of nuclear deal skeptics, Jalili was instrumental in stringing the Obama administration and European powers along while Iran frantically worked on refining uranium and improving its missile technology.
In recent years, Jalili has been one of the top “theorists” for Khamenei – which means he is one of the chief authors of the horrendous economic policies that brought Iran to the edge of ruin. Installing him as president could be a way for the regime to reject criticism of its policy agenda.
Jalili’s chief rival during the nuclear deal years was former parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani, who would have been a tenacious opponent in the 2024 presidential election, but he was one of the candidates disqualified by the Guardian Council. This could be a sign that the regime wants Jalili in office.
Alireza Zarkani, the sitting mayor of Tehran, was also a staunch Raisi ally who bailed out of the 2021 election to ensure Raisi’s victory. Some critics derided him as a “cover candidate” who only ran to give the illusion of competition in an election whose outcome had already been determined.
Zarkani earned the nickname “Revolutionary Tank” for his tactics of bulldozing reformist candidates with angry rhetoric. On the other hand, not even regime media could cover up his poor record as mayor of Tehran and he has been implicated in a string of financial scandals.
Zarkani has battlefield experience from the long and brutal Iran-Iraq War, including several serious injuries, and he became an outspoken critic of the 2015 nuclear deal, so he could be another candidate squeezed into the race by the regime to send a message to its subjects.
Mostafa Pourhammadi is an ugly customer, a former prosecutor and member of Iran’s brutal intelligence services, who sat the “death committee” alongside Raisi after the 1979 revolution, supervising the executions of thousands of political prisoners. Raisi was nicknamed the “Butcher of Tehran” for his part in those executions.
“Is it expected that I will talk about legal debates and care for civil and human rights in the middle of the battlefield?” Pourhammadi sneered when asked in a 2009 interview if he had any regrets about killing so many political prisoners.
Pourhammadi accused the administration of former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of corruption in the 2010s, so the regime’s disqualification of Ahmadinejad from the 2024 race could be a tip of the turban toward the brutal “hardliner.” Some observers think his purpose in the race is to influence the debates, moving them in directions desired by the Supreme Leader and his theocracy. Keeping the loud and eccentric Ahmadinejad, who has reinvented himself as an Islamist populist, off the stage would help Pourhammadi fulfill that role.
