Hamid Ahadi

After former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami left the important world economic ‎meeting at Davos, Switzerland and returned to Tehran, where he was forced to deal with ‎issues associated with the disqualification of 80 percent of reformist candidates for the ‎Majlis elections in March 2008, news came that senior statesmen of the Islamic regime ‎Hashemi Rafsanjani, Mohammad Khatami and Mehdi Karubi were conducting ‎consultations on the issue. It has also been reported that a group of reformists that ‎includes Dr Mohammad Reza Aref whose candidacy for the parliamentary elections has ‎not been rejected, have announced that participating in the forthcoming elections does not ‎make any sense because of the disqualifications.‎

Following President Ahmadinejad’s endorsement of the executive councils which ‎disqualified the large number of Majlis candidates, Mohsen Armin said that those people ‎who had turned ayatollah Khomeini’s saying of “people cast the final vote” into “an ‎individual casts the final vote” should be reproached.‎

On Friday, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad had said that unqualified individuals who ‎had signed up as candidates for the upcoming Majlis elections should be reproached. ‎Armin, a former MP himself, a recognized reformer and spokesman for the Mojahedin ‎Engelab Islami (Islamic Revolution Mojahedin) organization, responded by saying that ‎those who claimed that Iran was the freest country in the world under the current ‎administration while preventing 80 percent of dissidents from becoming candidates to the ‎Majlis need to be reproached, a direct reference to the words of president Ahmadinejad at ‎Columbia University in New York. “Those who do not have the tolerance for free ‎elections and democracy even as much as their communist and socialist allies in Latin ‎America should be reproached,” he added.‎

Armin went even further and said that if the criterion for disqualifying a candidate was ‎the damage that the person caused to the revolution, then Mr. Ahmadinejad would lead ‎the list of those who should be disqualified because of the costs he has imposed onto the ‎different aspects of the country.‎

In another response to the comments of the president, the managing editor of Aftab Yazd ‎newspaper wrote, “This week witnessed many strange remarks and the most unusual one ‎came from the president himself who said that if completely free elections were held in ‎the United States of America, then freedom-loving and revolutionary individuals would ‎be elected.” The editorial added that it was strange that the same person, while making ‎such remarks, also defends the disqualifications carried out by the provincial executive ‎councils and reproaches political groups for proposing unqualified candidates for the ‎forthcoming Majlis elections. ‎

Mohammad Abtahi, former vice president for parliamentary affairs wrote on his ‎webblog, “Mr. Safdar Hosseini is the person responsible for provincial candidates for ‎reformists. He has provided a detailed report on the disqualified candidates. It is ‎incredible to read many of the names of the disqualified candidates.” According to ‎Abtahi, many of the reformists now believe in boycotting the elections. Only 70 seats ‎remain for reformists to compete for the 255 remaining Majlis seats which belong to the ‎provinces. ‎