Hardline parliament speaker and five others approved to run for Iran president

Iran’s Guardian Council has approved the country’s hardline parliament speaker and five others to run in the country’s 28 June presidential election after a helicopter crash that killed the president, Ebrahim Raisi, and seven others.

The council again barred the former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a firebrand populist known for the crackdown that followed his disputed 2009 re-election, from running.

The council’s decision represents the starting gun for a shortened, two-week campaign to replace Raisi, a hardline protege of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei once floated as a possible successor for the 85-year-old supreme leader.

The selection of candidates approved by the Guardian Council, a panel of clerics and jurists ultimately overseen by Khamenei, suggests Iran’s Shia theocracy hopes to ease the election through after recent votes had record-low turnout and as tensions remain high over the country’s rapidly advancing nuclear programme, as well as the Israel-Hamas war.

The Guardian Council also continued its streak of not accepting a woman or anyone calling for radical change to the country’s governance.

The campaign will probably include debates by the candidates televised live on Iran’s state-run broadcaster. They also advertise on billboards and offer stump speeches to back their bids.

So far, none of them have offered any specifics, though all have promised a better economic situation for the country as it suffers from sanctions by the US and other western nations over its nuclear programme, which now enriches uranium closer than ever to weapons-grade levels.

Such matters of state remain the final decision of Khamenei, but presidents in the past have leaned either toward engagement or confrontation with the west over it.

The most prominent candidate is Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, 62, a former Tehran mayor with close ties to the country’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guards. However, many remember that Ghalibaf, as a former Guards general, was part of a violent crackdown on Iranian university students in 1999. He also reportedly ordered live gunfire to be used against students in 2003 while serving as the country’s police chief.

Ghalibaf ran unsuccessfully for president in 2005 and 2013. He withdrew from the 2017 presidential campaign to support Raisi in his first failed presidential bid. Raisi won the 2021 election, which had the lowest turnout ever for a presidential vote in Iran, after every significant opponent was disqualified.

Khamenei gave a speech last week alluding to qualities that Ghalibaf’s supporters have highlighted as potentially signalling the supreme leader’s support for the speaker.

Yet Ghalibaf’s role in crackdowns may be viewed differently after years of unrest that have gripped Iran, over its ailing economy and the mass protests sparked by the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who died after being arrested for allegedly not wearing her headscarf, or hijab, to the liking of security forces.

The Guardian Council disqualified Ahmadinejad, the Holocaust-questioning former president. Ahmadinejad increasingly challenged Khamenei toward the end of his term and is remembered for the bloody crackdown on the 2009 green movement protests. He was also disqualified in the last election by the panel.

The election comes at a time of heightened tensions between Iran and the west over its arming of Russia in that country’s war on Ukraine. Its support of militia proxy forces throughout the wider Middle East has been increasingly in the spotlight as Yemen’s Houthi rebels attack ships in the Red Sea over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.

Raisi, the Iranian foreign minister, Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and others were killed in the 19 May helicopter crash in the far north-west of Iran. Investigations are continuing, though authorities say there is no immediate sign of foul play in the crash on a cloud-covered mountainside.

Raisi is the second Iranian president to die in office. In 1981, a bomb blast killed Mohammad Ali Rajai in the chaotic days after the country’s Islamic Revolution.