Iran Governors Vow to Prevent Vote

Iran’s provincial governors escalated the dispute over next month’s elections by declaring Wednesday that they would not allow polling unless conservative clerics reversed their disqualification of liberal candidates.

Although Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has the power to overrule the governors, the declaration suggested that if the hard-liners did not back down, they would have to resort to extraordinary measures to hold the Feb. 20 legislative elections.

The conservative Guardian Council has disqualified more than a third of 8,200 candidates -- all of them liberals, with 80 sitting lawmakers among them. The move has triggered Iran’s biggest political crisis in years, with reformers accusing conservatives of trying to skew the vote.

Interior Ministry spokesman Jahanbakhsh Khanjani said the governors made their decision at a meeting in Tehran that ended Wednesday night.

Earlier Wednesday, Iran’s largest group of pro-reform students urged voters to boycott the elections to protest the disqualifications.

“There is no possibility of fair and free elections,” the student movement, the Office to Consolidate Unity, said in a statement carried on the official Islamic Republic News Agency.

President Mohammad Khatami tried to head off a boycott, saying he would seek to reverse the disqualifications down to the last unfairly treated candidate.

Last week, the government said that most of Iran’s six vice presidents and 24 Cabinet ministers had tendered their resignations in the dispute. But Khatami had not accepted their move.