Iranian factions gear up for crucial parliamentary vote

It was a case of mending political fences, Iranian-style.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former Revolutionary Guard commando who had unsettled Iran’s clerical establishment with his populist talk, met last week with Shiite Muslim clergy in the southern province of Bushehr ahead of parliamentary elections. His message: Government largesse would continue to flow their way.

“Since the beginning of the revolution it has been said that the government’s contributions to the clergymen and mosques make them part of the government,” he said. “On the contrary, the contributions are the duty of the government.”

The clergy is one of the key constituencies that political groups are busy reaching out to before Friday’s elections, which some analysts believe will be a barometer of Iran’s domestic and international direction.

Iran’s electoral politics differ starkly from those of the West. Thousands of largely liberal-minded reform candidates were barred from running in the election, by the Guardian Council, a body of clerics and jurists that vets candidates for loyalty to the country’s Islamic system. The council later reinstated 1,000 candidates.

“My quest for a parliamentary seat in Iran ends today,” wrote one barred candidate in a recent e-mail, asking that his name not be published. “The Guardian Council will not allow my name -- along with more than 200 other candidates from [my] district of Tehran -- on the ballot on the ground that ‘concrete proofs could not be made with regard to my belief in Islam and the Islamic Republic.’ ”

Within Iran’s restrictive political environment, there is still some lively debate and fierce competition among rival groups. Compared with other Middle Eastern countries, Iran’s competitive political culture resembles representative democracy, with campaign tours around the countryside, spirited attacks among opposing camps and rhetoric tailored to calibrate public expectations.

“Now we have to prepare ourselves to be a strong minority,” said Rasoul Montajebnia, of the reformist National Trust grouping, according to Iranian news agencies. “Expecting to occupy the majority of seats is not a realistic vision.”

The stifled reformists have by and large been reduced to promoting well-known figures such as former President Mohammad Khatami rather than crafting a platform and calling for increased social liberty to appeal to middle-class voters.

But though the Guardian Council has blocked many of the more liberal opposition candidates, Ahmadinejad’s parliamentary loyalists fear a challenge by an alliance of so-called pragmatic conservatives that includes Tehran Mayor Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf and former nuclear negotiators Hassan Rowhani and Ali Larijani. They claim to be the Islamic Republic’s true standard-bearers and have strong ties to the clerical establishment to back them up.

Currently Ahmadinejad is able to muster parliamentary majorities on most of his proposals and appointments. For example, his highly religious choice for minister of education, Ali-Reza Ali-Ahmadi, was approved Feb. 19 by a vote of 133 to 92, with 29 abstentions.

But signs abound that some members of the clerical establishment have tired of Ahmadinejad’s clique, which includes other former members of the elite Revolutionary Guard who came of age during the 1980s Iran-Iraq war. The president himself will be up for reelection in 2009.

Recently, news outlets close to Ahmadinejad harshly criticized Hassan Khomeini, a mid-ranking cleric and the grandson of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic. Khomeini had quoted his grandfather as having said that military figures such as those surrounding Ahmadinejad should stay out of politics.

Ahmadinejad’s supporters shot back. “When the reformists were in power you were given a brand new BMW and you were enjoying yourself in a warm sauna bath,” said one pro-Ahmadinejad website. “Being the grandson . . . does not give you the legitimacy to impose your judgment.”

The clerical establishment jumped into the fray, shutting down Nosazi.ir, a website critical of Khomeini, and jailing its editor.

“I suspect that there is a trend that wants to create a rift between the clerical establishment and the people,” former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, a powerful cleric, told worshipers at a Friday prayer gathering last month.

“I do hope those who attacked Mr. Hassan Khomeini were ignorant and not part of a preplanned plot against well-reputed clerics and the legacy of the Islamic Revolution.”

Billboard and media campaigning was forbidden until a week before the vote. But reformists alleged that Ahmadinejad’s supporters had already begun to deploy Shiite religious organizations to hand out food and money to buy votes in poor and rural areas.

All parties are banking on high turnout to show the world the Iranian system’s legitimacy. Even reformists, who complain that they are only being allowed to compete for half of the 290 parliamentary seats and worry that they will win no more than 10%, have ruled out calling for a boycott.

“In the forthcoming election, which is a celebration of true democracy, it is important people turn out in high numbers regardless of who will be in the parliament,” the conservative Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami told worshipers at Friday prayers last month.

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daragahi@latimes.com

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Special correspondent Mostaghim reported from Tehran and Times staff writer Daragahi from Baghdad.