After a day of rumors and counter-rumors, it’s official: President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ally Esfandiar Rahim Meshai and former President Hashemi Rafsanjani have been disqualified by the Guardian Council as candidates for the June 14 Iranian elections.The question some will be asking is: Why? After all, allowing Meshai and Rafsanjani to run would have added more legitimacy to the elections and more people would have turned out to vote. This would have given the Islamic Republic a much-needed boost to its foundering legitimacy.
While legitimacy is important to Iran's powers that be, what's more important is stability, especially at a time when the regime is facing increasing divisions as well as economic challenges. The rewards of allowing Meshai and Rafsanjani to run simply do not seem to have justified the high cost, as both would most likely have publicly questioned policies directly involving the domain of the supreme leader.
Take Rafsanjani, for example: He's the most senior person in Iran to have stated publicly that the chances of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's survival are small. Some conservatives inside the regime saw this as a gift to Iran's enemies, while others could have interpreted this as his criticism of the supreme leader and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps’ (IRGC) continued support for Assad. Had Rafsanjani been allowed to run, he could have brought this and the current nuclear policy up as election issues. This would have exposed such policies to public scrutiny, and criticism, none of which the supreme leader and the IRGC want in the public domain.
The same goes for Meshai. His participation would have created more divisions within the regime. Much like Rafsanjani, his participation would have united the often disunited conservatives; nevertheless, in the eyes of Iran's leadership, he seems to be too much of a divisive figure. And in all likelihood he, too, would have brought up what many in the regime consider to be taboos as election topics, such as discussion of “Iranian Islam.” This is a thorny issue which raised the ire of the IRGC and the clerics before and could do so again as nationalism is a popular subject among many Iranians. The fact that he recently threatened to reveal “behind the scenes information” is likely to have damaged his chances of having his candidacy approved even more.
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