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| Author: | Lionel Beehner |
|---|
June 15, 2005
Seven candidates are vying to succeed Mohammed Khatami as president of Iran, including frontrunner and former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, reformist candidate Mustafa Moin, and former chief of police Mohammed Baqur Qalibaf. To win votes from the Islamic Republic's large number of young voters, many candidates--even those considered conservative--are projecting themselves as pragmatic reformers. In slogans and in speeches, the leading candidates are promising greater openness, an improved economy, and better relations with the West.
On May 22, six presidential candidates, all members of Iran's ruling elite, were handpicked from a pool of more than 1,000 applicants by the Council of Guardians, an appointed body of 12 conservative jurists which vets candidates in Iran. (The Council can also block or amend legislation passed by Iran's parliament.) The next day, Moin and Mohsen Mehralizadeh, both reformists, were added as candidates at the insistence of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iran's most powerful political force. Conservative candidate Mohsen Rezai dropped out of the race June 15, heeding the request of religious leaders who wanted to avoid splintering the conservative vote. None of the candidates are women, who are forbidden in Iran from running for president.
Not much, experts say. "He is head of logistics and is allowed to administer things, but there's not a lot he can really do," says Bill Samii, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty's regional analysis coordinator for Southwest Asia. The president appoints cabinet members and heads the Supreme National Security Council (SNSC), which sets foreign policy, but, as Samii points out, the Supreme Leader, who is unelected and chosen for life, has final say over SNSC decisions. "The president has effectively shown himself, relative to unelected institutions, to be powerless," he says. The Supreme Leader is also commander-in-chief of the armed and police forces; the head the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting (IRIB), the state ministry in control of television and radio; and in charge of the country's judiciary. For this reason, on issues of national security and defense--including nuclear negotiations between Iran and Europe--most experts predict the election will have limited impact.
Rafsanjani emerged in May as the frontrunner, but Qalibaf and Moin have closed in on his lead considerably in recent weeks. According to a June 14 poll commissioned by Fars News Agency, Rafsanjani is projected to receive just under a quarter of the vote, with Qalibaf winning 20 percent and Moin around 10 percent. If no candidate wins a majority of the votes on June 17, as many experts predict, the highest two vote-getters enter second-round runoff elections June 24. Experts caution that Iranian voter behavior is hard to predict, given that many Iranians may be unwilling to speak openly to pollsters.
Polls show that just under half of Iran's 42 million eligible voters will turn out to vote, a significant drop from previous presidential elections in 1997 and 2001, when voter turnout was 90 percent and 68 percent respectively. Besides widespread voter apathy, many Iranians--particularly those under 30, who comprise two-thirds of the country's 72 million inhabitants--say they're boycotting the election to protest the powerlessness of Iran's executive branch. Low voter turnout has some religious authorities in Iran worried, experts say. "Not voting would show that the legitimacy of the rulers is demolished and show the people of the world, especially Western countries, that this government is not a democracy," says Mohsen Sazegara, one of the original founders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and a visiting fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Many student groups, including the Office for Fostering Unity, say an election-day boycott will push the government to hold a referendum to reform Iran's constitution and, in effect, curb the powers of the Council of Guardians. But some experts predict that many reform-minded voters will turn up at the polls, despite their boycott threats, to ensure that their preferred candidate, Moin, will make it to the election's second round.
Among them:
These candidates are considered by polls and pundits to have little to no chance of winning more than a small percentage of the vote. They are:
--by Lionel Beehner, staff writer, cfr.org
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