It took the reformists a while to agree on their preferred candidates for today’s parliamentary and Assembly of Experts elections. In the end, on 16 February they announced they had reached consensus with ‘moderates’ - including former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Hassan Khomeini, grandson of the 1979 Revolution’s leader – and some ‘principlists’ on ‘The Grand Coalition of Reformists’.
The coalition published a preferred list of parliamentary candidates in every city and a preferred list of Assembly of Experts candidates in every province. In Tehran there were 30 names for 30 parliamentary seats, and 16 names for 16 seats in the Assembly of Experts, including Hassan Rouhani, who while a candidate for the Assembly was not outspoken given his role as president.
The reformists’ preferences raised a few eyebrows. As well as suggesting many unknown figures, the coalition included some principlists, including three former intelligence ministers not widely seen as sympathetic to the reformists’ traditional goals.
Sadegh Zibakalam, the reform-inclined professor of political science at the University of Tehran, said the mass disqualification of reformist candidates by the Guardian Council made compiling the lists difficult. “We didn’t have much choice left. Nearly 90% of reformist candidates, even the second- and third-rate ones, were disqualified. So we had to either boycott the elections and leave the political ground to the principlists, or change our strategy.”
The reformists picked the latter. According to Zibakalam they decided to invest in a new, young generation of candidates who are not necessarily reformists and hope that if they get to the parliament and the Assembly, at least some of them will gravitate towards reformism. But he adds that this was not enough and they were still short of candidates, so they had to approach some principlists.
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