Centre for a Democratic Iran
March 2, 2016
Sustaining Jennati in the Assembly of Experts; Ambiguous and Questionable Sina Pakzad To be or not to be of Ahmad Jennati, that is the question: was there a deal to reinstate him in the Assembly of Experts? Did the government give in to make concession to the Guardian Council on keeping Jennati in the list of the experts of Tehran?
This is the question the answer of which is not clear and doesn’t appear to have a concrete answer, but the result is questionable. Those who voted for the reformists’ coalition list in Tehran on Friday now ask how it was possible that all the candidates of this list in the Islamic Consultative Assembly managed to win the seats but a similar event didn’t happen in their list of the Experts. According to the final results announced by the Election Office of the Ministry of Interior on Monday morning, 15 out of 16 of the candidates elected to the Assembly of Experts in Tehran are all the figures supported by the reformists, but only the name of Jennati, the chairman of the Guardian Council of the Constitution is seen on this list as the candidate of the conservatives. Ambiguity and doubt about his votes is especially more highlighted when earlier the Ministry of Interior had announced that the votes of the Assembly of Experts would be counted earlier than the votes of the Islamic Consultative Assembly, but this didn’t happen. The delay in the announcement of the final result of the votes caused the suspicion that there were pressures on the Ministry of Interior to sustain
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Centre for a Democratic Iran
March 2, 2016
Jennati on the list of the Experts. He was at the bottom of the list, but remained in the Assembly of Experts.
Worries about the manipulation of the votes The suspicions about the results of the elections are not limited only to Jennati to remain among the elected Experts in Tehran or not. There are worries about the manipulation of the votes in two other provinces of Elburz and Razavi Khorasan (Mashhad), too. There were numerous reports from the journalists and observers in these two regions, indicating illegal pressures to change the results of votes and bringing the candidates of the conservatives up. In Elburz province the conditions are so vague that the winner candidate hasn’t been known yet, but in Mashhad the names of some conservative figures were announced as elected and there were uproars from the reformists. A statement was issued by the reformists in this city in which it was written “despite the suspicions resulted from the meaningful delay of the executive authorities of Razavi Khorasan in announcing the combination and total votes in Mashhad, judging and announcing a clear and precise comment about what happened in Mashhad is very difficult, however, this bitterness that we have been suffering for years in this region must not remove the sweetness of winning more than 50 percent of seats of the parliament by the candidates of the Omid list and more than that by the independents throughout the country from the taste of this noble, and committed to
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Centre for a Democratic Iran
March 2, 2016
the national interest people.� In their statement, they also emphasized that they will submit their questions and objections based on the existing evidence to the authorities. Denial of failure In total, the conservatives are the losers of the elections of the Majles (parliament) and the Assembly of Experts. They don’t want to accept this defeat and their media constantly propagate that the majority of the next parliament is for the conservatives and the reformists managed to win only in Tehran. Vahid Yamin Pour, a conservative journalist, in a note that was released in Raja News Site confirming this claim had said that the votes of Tehranis are because of their different lifestyle with the other cities and those votes should not be considered as political votes. The Fars News Agency, too, released a note claiming that the victory of the reformists in the elections of the Majles and the Assembly of Experts is merely an illusion and in total they lost the elections. And it was interesting that the conservatives also published charts in which the share of the conservative representatives of the parliament was estimated more than that of the reformists. Cautious steps The game is not over here and this is only the beginning of the story. The previous experiences show that the conservatives never sit quiet after defeat and we should expect unexpected events in the political atmosphere of Iran during the future months. As shortly after the elections of the sixth parliament and the decisive victory of the reformists, Saeed Hajjarian was assassinated and two months later, that is, in April, 2000, the speeches of Khamenei on the press are the enemy base became the background of mass banning of the criticizing media. The previous experiences now made the reformists take steps more cautious than before. They have just returned to the political scene with trembling steps after six years of being suppressed and accessed a share of the seats of power. In order to create a safety net over their head, the reformists welcome coalition with the moderates and the mild fundamentalists to have less vulnerability. There is also a change in the social body of the supporters of the reformists. The people who voted for the Omid list on Friday don’t have any hope for the highest changes and their most important priority was sending the hardliners out which has been achieved to a considerable extent.
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