Parliamentary elections begin in Iran, ban on many candidates

This article was originally published in English

Iran’s supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei voted on Friday in Iran’s first parliamentary elections in 2022 after mass protests over a mandatory hijab law following the death of Mahsa Amini and the brutal crackdown that followed.

New members of Iran’s Assembly of Experts will also be elected in the voting. If Khamenei resigns or dies, the panel of clerics, who serve eight-year terms, is obliged to elect a new supreme leader, making his role more important given Khamenei’s age at 84. Are being given.

About 15,000 candidates are competing for a seat in the 290-member parliament, formally known as the Islamic Consultative Assembly. The term is of four years and five seats are reserved for religious minorities in Iran.

Under the law, Parliament oversees the executive branch, voting on treaties and dealing with other matters. In practice, absolute power in Iran rests with its supreme leader.

Fundamentalists have controlled Parliament for the last two decades.

More recently, Parliament has focused on issues related to mandatory headscarves, or hijab, for women, following the death of 22-year-old Amini in police custody in 2022, which sparked protests across the country.

The protests soon turned into calls for the overthrow of Iran’s cleric leaders. According to Amnesty International, the subsequent repression led to more than 500 deaths and more than 22,000 arrests.

In recent weeks, calls to boycott the elections have spread, including from women’s rights activists. Narges MohammadiCaptured the Nobel Peace Prize laureate, who called him a “spectacle.”

Calls for a boycott have put renewed pressure on the government: since the Islamic Revolution of 1979, the Iranian theocracy partly bases its legitimacy on participation in elections.

additional sources • Enrique Barrucco (voice-over)