Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, looks meaningfully into the camera as he holds a piece of paper poised over a plastic ballot box. “Elections are the bulwark of our nation,” proclaims the Farsi caption. “People at the polling stations will protect the destiny of our nation and prevent our enemies taking over our land.”
Khamenei is looking down from a giant poster in the courtyard of the Shahid Motaheri mosque in south Tehran, a poor area where support for his ultra-conservative leadership is strong. Only a few hundred people have come to this rally but there is a flurry of excitement at the arrival of Gholamali Haddad-Adel, the first candidate on the main list of hardline “principalists” contesting Friday’s parliamentary poll.
Haddad-Adel is followed by a media gaggle – including a few of the foreign journalists who have been given rare visas to report from Iran – as well as an officer of the Revolutionary Guards with a clenched fist and Kalashnikov badge gleaming on his dark green uniform. Speeches follow afternoon prayers in the Islamic Republic’s classic combination of faith and power.
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