Rohollah Faghihi reports that a conservative critical of the current Iranian administration, Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, unexpectedly wins an election to head the Assembly of Experts, responsible for electing Supreme Leader:
Seemingly, Yazdi’s victory was the result of the quiet activities of conservatives. According to an Iranian newspaper, Movahedi Kermani, a key conservative figure, had visited Qom, considered one of the power centers of Iran, one day before the election. This visit is indicative of a coordinated effort to obtain the chairmanship of the Assembly of Experts.
A red herring may have been waved about:
What may have misled the moderates was the publicity campaign of conservatives over the possible nomination of Shahroudi. One day before the election, Hujjat al-Islam Reza Taghavi, a member of the conservative Combatant Clergy Association, said: “I assume that the majority of Assembly of Experts’ members are in agreement with Shahroudi [chairmanship].” It’s possible that moderates felt assured that either Rafsanjani or Shahroudi would be the new chairman. (Yazdi denied that his nomination had been planned.)
And yet the loser, Hashemi Rafsanjani, may in the end have a different goal in mind:
Political observers feel that perhaps Rafsanjani’s nomination was aimed at reminding people that the upcoming Assembly of Experts election is vital. Rafsanjani’s nomination in the 2013 presidential elections — which was denied by the Guardian Council – certainly helped create an early level of enthusiasm for the election.
The current period of Assembly of Experts is to end next year, and the next election scheduled Feb. 26. We’ll see then if Rafsanjani’s gambit pays off.
However, others see the conviction and harsh sentencing of his son, Mehdi, on corruption charges as indicative of his permanent loss of power:
Many Iranian analysts have interpreted the harsh sentence handed down to Mehdi Hashemi as politically motivated and aimed at hammering the last nails on his father’s political coffin.
This analysis may contain a kernel of truth but it is a mistake to ignore the essential reality of the case, namely that prosecutors had a very strong case against Hashemi junior, who besides corruption was also convicted on an additional security-related charge.
Undoubtedly the sentence damages Hashemi Rafsanjani and may come to be regarded as the moment when he was finally ousted from the system. A key figure in the post-revolutionary Iranian establishment, Rafsanjani fell out of favour in the summer of 2009 in the wake of street protests following Ahmadinejad’s controversial re-election to the presidency.
The undercurrents of Iranian politics seem to be at least as murky as our own.
