'Reality is even worse': reformist hopefuls banned from Iran's parliamentary poll

Iran’s Guardian Council, which vets candidates for elections, has failed to qualify 40% of more than 12,000 candidates for parliamentary elections on 26 February,ILNA news agency has reported. 

Reformists told Tehran Bureau that those blocked included the vast majority of their hopefuls. “I predicted that the Guardian Council would massively disqualify the reformists,” said Sadegh Zibakalam, professor of political science at Tehran University. “But the reality is even worse.”

According to Hossein Marashi, a member of the Reformists’ Policy Council, which was set up in October to coordinate efforts for the parliamentary poll, out of the total 3,000 reformist candidates, only 30, or 1%, have been qualified. Their criterion of ‘reformist’ appears unclear, and may include pragmatic conservatives, or ‘moderates’, like supporters of president Hassan Rouhani or former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Two of Rafsanjani’s children, Mehdi and Fatemeh, are among those not qualified, as is Morteza Eshraghi, grandson of the founder of the Islamic Republic Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. In Tehran, from nearly 1,700 candidates, 760 were qualified, among which only four - Mohammad-Reza Aref, Soheila Jelodarzadeh, Mostafa Kavakebian and Alireza Mahjoub - were reformists, according to the reformist newspaper Arman.

After gathering information on each candidate from four bodies; the intelligence ministry, the police, the justice ministry and the Interior Ministry, the Guardian Council’s Central Board of Supervision announced on 17 January that it had disqualified 25% of would-be candidates, adding that it could not “authenticate” the qualification of another 29%.