On Wednesday, February 24th, 2016, the National Council of Resistance of Iran-US Representative office held a briefing on the 2016 elections in Iran. The elections are set to take place on Friday, February 26th, 2016 and will involve candidates for Iranian’s Assembly of Experts and Parliament. Alireza Jafarzadeh, the Deputy Director of the US office, presented a power-point presentation followed by a question and answer session from the journalists and diplomats present at the briefing, as well as questions posted through the social media.
Along with the presentation, Jafarzadeh also released a book published by the NCRI-US on the Iranian elections that details the entire elective process, the current status of the elections, and the prospect for post-election Iran. The book is titled “The 2016 Vote in Iran’s Theocracy: An analysis of Parliamentary & Assembly of Experts Elections,” and is available on the websites of Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Books-A-Million.
In the presentation, Mr. Jafarzadeh provided important background information about both legislative bodies that were up for election in 2016. The Assembly of Experts is comprised of 88 clerics who are elected to 8-year terms. These members are tasked with appointing and supervising the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei. The Assembly of Experts also holds two closed-door sessions every year where the content of those meetings is largely kept secret and away from the Iranian public. Jafarzadeh also noted that the Assembly of Experts has never seriously challenged any decisions of a Supreme Leader. The Iranian Parliament is a unicameral legislative body consisting of 290 members who represent Iran’s 31 provinces and are up for election every 4 years. In 2016, all 290 seats in the Parliament are up for grabs. Powers of the Parliament include drafting legislation, ratifying international treaties, and approving the budget.
Jafarzadeh described that all candidates for Parliament and for Assembly of Experts are required to be approved by Iran’s Guardian Council. The vetting process in Iran is one that is very unique to Iran and unlike any other country. The Guardian Council, a government body of 6 clerics and 6 lawyers appointed directly and indirectly by the Supreme Leader, selects all candidates for Parliament and Assembly of Experts. The Guardian Council functions like a filter at the behest of the Supreme Leader during elections and dismisses a significant portion of the candidates. Rejections of candidacy are often based on vague and arbitrary criteria centered around a candidate’s ideals and devotion to the current regime, as reformist candidates are more likely to be rejected approval than traditional, conservative candidates. For the 2016 election, over 12,000 candidates registered for the Parliamentary election while initially only around 4,000 candidates were approved. For the election of the Assembly of Experts, the Guardian Council only approved 166 of the 801 registered candidates.
Mr. Jafarzadeh explained that, on the basis of confidential documents obtained by the National Council of Resistance of Iran from inside the regime and the factional feuding at the lower levels of the regime, Supreme Leader Khamenei has been designing a plan to engineer the elections and has already implemented this engineering. According to his plan, the Principalists must maintain a majority in parliament and the IRGC, which is the Guardian Council’s main organization used for election and political oversight, must influence the elections with all its resources. Additionally, Jafarzadeh highlighted Khamenei’s two main objectives for engineering election results in Iran. First, that the Principalists (his own faction) keep their majority in parliament. Second, any threat of uprising or social protest, which remains a red line for the regime, must be averted.
Jafarzadeh also highlighted the reformists’ strategy for the 2016 election, a faction led by two well-known reformists in Iran, Hashemi Rafsanjani and Iranian president Hassan Rouhani. Their strategy called for a large number of “reformists” candidates registering for the election. The candidates were split into three different categories: well-known figures, less-known figures, and an unknown field of candidates who committed to working in the context of reformist policies if elected. The reaction to this strategy by the Guardian Council resulted in almost all of the well-known reformist candidates and half of the less-known reformist candidates being rejected. This has left no reformist candidates or government supporters left in some Iranian provinces.
Mr. Jafarzadeh went into an analysis of the election explaining that the infighting within the regime is significant in 2016 because of a multitude of reasons. The Supreme Leader’s authority has been significantly undermined since the 2009 national uprisings that followed the presidential election involving Ahmadinejad and Mousavi. Khamenei fears another uprising similar to the one in 2009. Additionally, the international sanctions on Iran since 2011 have been having an impact inside the country and stirring up discontent with the regime in the Iranian population. Jafarzadeh emphasized that the Iranian regime is currently extremely weak and are concerned with their control of the citizens.
The briefing ended with Jafarzadeh overviewing the underlying conclusions of the 2016 election. He explained that the election system in Iran is a total sham and that it has no legitimacy. This has led a majority of Iranian citizens to shun elections by simply not participating in the election or casting a blank ballot. Jafarzadeh noted that the election system has the appearance of a democracy and can fool outsiders because of this, but there is no meaningful representation of the Iranian people. He concluded by saying that whatever the outcome of the election is, the winner would not be any of the two major factions of the Iranian regime, but rather the infighting during the elections would weaken the regime as a whole. Because of this, an opportunity will be created for the majority of the Iranian people, who reject the clerical system in its totality, to seek democratic change.
