The council’s selections, which reflect the preferences of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, virtually guarantee the election of a hard-line government at a moment when Tehran is trying to revive a tattered nuclear deal with six world powers, roll back U.S.-imposed economic sanctions and mend relations with neighbors such as Saudi Arabia.
One of the candidates, Ebrahim Raisi, a conservative cleric who heads Iran’s judiciary, is widely viewed as the front-runner and the consensus choice of Iran’s hard-line factions. Raisi, who unsuccessfully ran for president four years ago, is also seen as a possible successor to Khamenei. He has been linked by human rights groups to mass killings of dissidents in 1988, when he served on a panel involved in sentencing prisoners to death.
Two people who were barred from the election were regarded as among a few figures with the stature to challenge Raisi: Ali Larijani, a center-right former parliament speaker and nuclear negotiator, and Eshaq Jahangiri, a reformist and Rouhani’s vice president.
Jahangiri said in a statement that he views “the disqualification of many worthy people as a serious threat to public participation and fair competition of different political parties and movements, especially the reformists.”
Sadegh Larijani, a cleric who serves on the Guardian Council and is a brother of Ali Larijani, issued a sweeping condemnation of the council’s selections. He has defended the body for 20 years, he wrote on Twitter, “but I have never found the decisions of the council so indefensible.”