Page 58 - bne_Magazine_May_2017_print

58 I Eurasia bne May 2017
Ahmadinejad excluded, Rouhani and
Raisi set for showdown in Iranian
elections
Will Conroy in Prague
In striking down the wildcard candidacy of hardline ex-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad late on April 20, Iran’s Guardian Council appears
to have set up a two-horse race.
Centrist cleric President Hassan Rouhani has emerged from the vetting process with permission to pursue a second term, but standing in his way
is stern-faced religious judge Ebrahim Raisi (picture above, centre), seen by some analysts as odds-on favourite to succeed 77-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and as someone capable of galvanising conservatives.
To the astonishment of many observers, Ahmadinejad turned up in early April to submit his paperwork for a planned run to bewildered election officials. Khamenei had even taken the unusual step last year of publicly advising that the self-styled “defender of the work-
www.bne.eu
ing classes” should stay out of the fray for his own good and the country’s.
Ahmadinejad, president from 2005 to 2013, nevertheless pushed ahead, but
he, like everybody, had to bow before
the Vilayat-e Faqih, the Rule of the Jurists. The political philosophy of revolution-
ary founding father Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini holds that those best qualified to govern are those best equipped to inter- pret God’s law. Hence the powerful Guard- ian Council voted to exclude the polarising populist as it whittled down the field to six from around 1,300 would-be candidates.
Speculation as to whom the Council might disqualify had been rife and on 21 April the Financial Times reported that hardline clerics on the constitutional watchdog had even come close to excluding Rouhani, with the vote on permitting his candidacy at one point deadlocked at six for and six against.
But Rouhani, architect of the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, which eased sanctions that had Iran’s economy in a chokehold, finally made it through the secretive process.
As Sanam Vakil, an associate fellow
at Chatham House and professorial lecturer at Johns Hopkins University’s SAIS Europe, told bne IntelliNews prior to the Guardian Council meeting in the holy city of Qom: “Iranian elec- tions are notoriously unpredictable.”
Vakil sees the upcoming election as a high-stakes contest that will have huge consequences for the Iranian electorate. She has taken a keen interest in the pro- posed candidacy of Raisi, director of the billion-dollar religious foundation Astan Quds Razavi controlled by Khamenei’s office and in charge of Iran’s holiest shrine. In a jointly authored Foreign Affairs arti- cle, published on 9 April, she concluded