Candidates for Iran's parliament began campaigning Thursday in the country's first election since the 2022 crackdown on nationwide protests that followed the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody.
Iran's state television said 15,200 candidates will compete for a four-year term in the 290-seat chamber, which has been controlled by hard-liners for the past two decades. It's a record number and more than twice the candidates who ran in the 2020 election, when voter turnout was just over 42%, the lowest since the 1979 revolution, reported The Associated Press.
Amini died in September 2022, after she was arrested by Iran’s morality police for allegedly violating the country’s strict headscarf law that forces women to cover their hair and entire bodies. The protests quickly escalated into calls to overthrow Iran’s clerical rulers. In the severe crackdown that followed, over 500 people were killed and nearly 20,000 were arrested, according to human rights activists in Iran.
On Wednesday, the Guardian Council election watchdog sent the names of the 15,200 qualified candidates to the interior ministry, which holds the election. Any candidate for elections in Iran must be approved by the Council, a 12-member clerical body, half of whom are directly appointed by the supreme leader.
The candidates include 1,713 women, which is more than double the 819 who ran in 2020. The election will be held March 1, and the new parliament will convene in late May.
Large billboards and election posters have sprung up in Tehran and other cities to announce the start of campaigning, urging people to take part.
But the first official day of campaigning did not see a large number of banners erected in favor of individual candidates or their coalitions.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has urged people to head to the polling stations.
"Everyone should participate in elections," he said on Sunday. "It is important to choose the best person, but the priority is for people to participate."
Large posters have been erected of Khamenei casting a vote at a polling station during a previous election. The few opinion polls that have been held and released in recent weeks showed that more than half the Iranians are indifferent about taking part in the elections.
Public discontent
Some opposition figures in Iran and members of the diaspora have in recent weeks called for a total boycott of the polls.
In the absence of serious competition from reformists and moderates, journalist Maziar Khosravi expected the new parliament would likely continue to be controlled by conservatives.
Only between 20 and 30 of the reformist candidates who submitted applications have been approved to run in the upcoming election, reformist politicians said.
The current parliament, elected in 2020, has been dominated by conservatives and ultra-conservatives after many reformists and moderates were disqualified.
On Monday, former reformist president Mohammad Khatami said Iran was "very far from free, participatory, and competitive elections".
He pointed to growing popular "discontent" among Iranians.
Former moderate president Hassan Rouhani has called on the people to vote "to protest against the ruling minority", but he did not call for a boycott.
Rouhani recently announced that he was barred from seeking re-election to the Assembly of Experts after 24 years of membership.
The Reform Front, a key coalition of reformist parties, has meanwhile said it will not take part in "meaningless, non-competitive, and ineffective elections".
"Most of the candidates, particularly in small constituencies, are doctors, engineers, civil servants, and teachers who are not affiliated with any political group," said the journalist Khosravi.
By allowing such a large pool of candidates to run, the government "wants to create local competition and increase participation" to help attract voters, he added.
Despite the absence of challengers to the conservatives, "the battle is expected to be serious and bloody," he added.
He nonetheless predicted that current MPs would not be re-elected for a new term, especially as "economic conditions have made people unhappy with the current representatives."
Double vote
Current parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf will run for election from his hometown, a constituency in the remote northeast, after winning a seat in the capital of Tehran four years ago.
Such a change in districts usually indicates shrinking popularity. In recent years, his fellow hard-line critics have occasionally accused him of ignoring the rights of other parliament members and disregarding reports of corruption while he was Tehran mayor.
In a separate election on March 1, 144 clerics will compete for the all-cleric 88-seat Assembly of Experts that functions as an advisory body to Khamenei, who has final say on all state matters. Their assembly members' term is eight years.
Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi, who is also an assembly member, will seek reelection for the assembly seat in a remote constituency in South Khorasan province, competing against a low-profile cleric there.
Under the constitution, the assembly monitors the country’s supreme leader and chooses his successor. Khamenei, who will be 85 in April, has been supreme leader for 34 years.
