Items 1 through 6 of the set depict Iranian presidential hopefuls Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf and Amir? In Tehran, Iran, on February 21, 2020, June 20, 2024, June 22, 2024, and June 23, 2024, Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi, Alireza Zakani, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, Saeed Jalili, and Masoud Pezeshkian. Ebrahim Raisi’s death in a helicopter crash last month, Iranians will vote in an early presidential election on June 28 between mostly hardline candidates.
The hardline Guardian Council, a panel of clerics and jurists headed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has final say over all matters pertaining to the state, selected six candidates out of more than 80 applicants. In the end, the president is accountable to the Supreme Leader because he or she runs the government on a day-to-day basis and is particularly accountable for Iran’s struggling economy.
Following are brief portrayals of five hardliners and one moderate contender for the impending political race: BAQER QALIBAF, MOHAMMED Qalibaf is the current speaker of the hardline-dominated parliament. He was a commander in the Iran Revolutionary Guards and a friend of Khamenei. He recently ran fruitlessly for president two times and was constrained to pull out from a third offered in 2017 to forestall an isolated hardline vote in Raisi’s underlying bombed official endeavor.
In 2005, Qalibaf left the Gatekeepers to run for president. After his unsuccessful campaign, he was elected Tehran mayor with the support of the supreme leader, a position he held for 12 years.
As Tehran’s mayor in 2009, Qalibaf claimed credit for suppressing months of bloody unrest that shook the establishment following a presidential election that opposition candidates claimed was rigged to ensure Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election. To social equality activists, he is referred to as somebody who squashed fights as public police boss, specifically beating demonstrators in 1999, and furthermore assumed a functioning part in curbing turmoil in 2003. A request for clarification regarding those allegations was unanswered by Qalibaf.
JALILI SAEED Jalili is a hardline representative who lost his right leg during the 1980s while battling for the Gatekeepers in the Iran-Iraq war. Jalili, who has a PhD in political science, has said that he is a religious believer in Iran’s “velayat-e faqih,” or rule by supreme jurisprudence, which is the Islamic government system that Khamenei uses as his foundation.
Selected by Khamenei, Jalili filled in as secretary of the Preeminent Public safety Committee for quite a long time from 2007, a place that consequently made him boss atomic moderator. Jalili likewise served for a long time in Khamenei’s office and was a fruitless up-and-comer in the 2013 official political decision. Jalili, a former deputy foreign minister, was appointed by Khamenei in 2013 to the Expediency Council, a body that mediates between the Guardian Council and parliament.
PEZESHKIAN MASSOUD
Pezeshkian, an Iranian legislator of Azeri descent, is the only moderate candidate supported by the reform camp and approved by the Guardian Council. His possibilities rely upon drawing in huge number of frustrated electors who have remained at home in decisions beginning around 2020.
A doctor by calling, Pezeshkian filled in as the wellbeing pastor under reformist President Mohammad Khatami from 2001 to 2005 and has held a seat in parliament starting around 2008. Pezeshkian has voiced his disapproval of the Islamic Republic for its concealment of the 2022 death in custody of a young Iranian Kurdish woman named Mahsa Amini, which sparked several months of unrest.
Pezeshkian was banished from the 2021 official political decision. POURMOHAMMADI MOSTAFA Pourmohammadi, the only cleric in the race, was interior minister from 2005 to 2008 under hardline former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Rights groups have alleged that he was involved in the 1998 assassinations of several prominent dissident intellectuals in Iran. He served as deputy intelligence minister from 1990 to 1999.
“A small number of irresponsible, deviant, and rogue agents of the ministry who were most likely puppets of others committed these assassinations that were in the interest of foreigners,” read a 1998 statement from the Intelligence Ministry. He has not commented on the allegations. In a 2005 report, Human Rights Watch detailed Pourmohammadi’s alleged involvement in the 1988 execution of hundreds of political prisoners in Tehran.
Pourmohammadi has never openly tended to charges about his job in a purported “passing panel” in 1988 containing strict adjudicators, examiners and knowledge service authorities that directed the executions. ZAKANI ALIREZA Zakani, the hardline mayor of Tehran and a former legislator, was disqualified from running for president in 2013 and 2017.
Zakani, a former commander of the volunteer Basij militia affiliated with the Guards, backed Raisi in the 2021 presidential election. “In the 2024 election, I will stay and compete until the end to continue the path of (Raisi),” however, Zakani wrote in a post on X. AMIRHOSSEIN GHAZIZADEH-HASHEMI Ghazizadeh-Hashemi, the current vice president and head of the Martyrs’ Foundation, is a hardline former legislator who received a low number of votes in the 2021 presidential election.
