Cold Start in Tehran As Elections Heat Up
Excitement over Iran's presidential election is missing, despite election day being two weeks away.
The June presidential election in Iran is approaching and the campaigns are escalating, but there is little sign of excitement about the election on the streets of Tehran.
Unlike the previous presidential election in 2009, it seems that the final candidates introduced by the Guardian Council have failed to organize their supporters mainly because they have not emerged from a clear structural basis formed by influential political parties. According to the constitution, all Iranian citizens who have been born in Iran, believe in God and the official religion of the country (Islam), have always been loyal to the constitution, and are more than 21 years of age are allowed to sign up as candidates to run for the presidency.
Lack of clarity is not unusual in elections held in Iran. Everything before, during and after Election Day is not completely clear. This is “part and parcel of a lack of political parties or groups with a large social base and lack of an established process for candidate selection,” said Farideh Farhi, an independent scholar and an affiliate of the political science faculty at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, to the Foreign Policy Association. “In every election, new mechanisms and processes are invented or improvised as potential candidates jockey to establish their viability or ability to attract votes.” In such a process, everything goes to the last couple of months ahead of the election day. In the 2009 presidential election, the candidacy of Mir Hossein Mousavi was announced only three months in advance. At the time, however, leading contenders managed to gain support from a highly divided society which was willing to participate in the election.
The amount of uncertainty among candidates, political circles and voters in Iran’s 11th presidential election has been particularly high: Prominent figures such as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council Saeed Jalili, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s ally Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, and former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani all threw their hats in the ring in the last minutes of the registration process.
