TEHRAN, 3 February 2004 — Iran’s main reformist party, the Islamic Iran Participation Front (IIPF), will boycott parliamentary elections on Feb. 20 following the widespread barring of its candidates, its leader Mohammad Reza Khatami said yesterday.
“The Participation Front has decided by a very large majority not to participate” in the poll, Khatami, brother of Iran’s pro-reform President Mohammad Khatami, told a press conference after a meeting of party delegates.
“We have no hope that free and legal elections will be held on Feb. 20,” he said, while stressing that the IIPF could change its mind if the polls were postponed as the reformists are demanding.
He also said the party was not calling on the electorate to stay away from the polling booths, adding that it was “their sovereign choice.”
“We support the position of the government not to organize give-away elections,” said Khatami, who on Sunday had warned the disqualifications amounted to a conservative “coup d’etat” supported by the military.
The conservative Guardians Council vetting body in January barred some 3,500 would-be candidates out of around 8,000. Most were reformists, banned for an alleged lack of respect for Islam and the constitution.
Subsequently, the Council — ordered to carry out a review by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — reinstated 1,160 in a drawn-out appeals process, but some 80 sitting MPs, prominent pro-reform figures and allies of the embattled president remained barred.
Some 120 members of Parliament have resigned in protest, along with all provincial governors in what many see as the Islamic Republic’s most serious crisis ever as it celebrates its 25th anniversary.
Hard-liners yesterday dismissed any talk of postponing the elections, as sought by reformists. And election organizers in Tehran, which sends 30 deputies to parliament, said it was impossible to stage the polls in the capital on the due date.
Reformists dominate government and parliament but the spectre of such a “coup” being plotted by hardliners over the parliamentary elections has been quietly circulating, although few have raised it publicly.
Both President Khatami and Parliament Speaker Mehdi Karrubi want now to call on supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to intervene and find a solution to the dilemma.
Constitutionally Khamenei has the final say on all state affairs and could make the Guardian Council, which is in charge of checking the ideological qualifications of candidates, revise the ban.
According to the law, elections can only be postponed in case of war or if the country is under military occupation - no other reasons can be accepted, Reza Zavarehi, one of the jurists on the council, told the news service Mehr . Conservatives say that even during the 1980-1988 war against Iraq elections were held as scheduled.
There are neither legal not technical grounds for postponing the elections as the new legislative term must start on May 27 and considering the possibility of second ballots and complaints, the timing must be very accurate, Zavarehi said. Interior Minister Mussavi Lari had reiterated in an emergency Cabinet meeting on Sunday night that the time was not ripe for elections.
