Elections in Iran, who are the six presidential candidates

The presidential elections in Iran will be held on Friday 28 June.Only six candidates were admitted to participate in the round.

Chances are the next elections in Iran they will not lead to a turning point in the governance of the Middle Eastern nation.Most of the candidates allowed to run for the presidential, scheduled for Friday 28 June, they are in fact conservatives:only one is a reformist.And not even a woman is on the list.

There is something new, however:the list presents just a religious person, while five of the eight presidents of the Islamic Republic, after the 1979 revolution, were members of the Shiite clergy.Whoever wins will take the place of Ebrahim Raisi, crashed last May 19th in a helicopter while returning from the inauguration ceremony of a dam on the border with Azerbaijan.

The unquestionable ax of the Guardian Council of Iran on the candidates

I am six authorized candidates in total to stand for election from Council of Guardians of the Constitution, a non-elective body dominated by conservatives and charged with overseeing the electoral process.This out of a total of 80 people who initially showed up.This is the current President of Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, of the mayor of Tehran Alireza Zakani, of the former head of negotiations on the nuclear issue Said Jalili, of the head of the Martyrs' Foundation Amir-Hossein Ghazizadeh Hachemi, of the former Interior Minister Mostafa Pourmohammadi And, the only candidate out of the pack and in its own way "progressive", Massoud Pezeshkian, MP for the city of Tabriz and former Minister of Health.

However, the ultra-conservative and populist former minister will not be able to present himself Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who hoped at 67 to return to the top of Iran, after having led the nation from 2005 to 2013.This is the third rejection for him, after those of 2017 and 2021.Likewise, the candidacy of Ali Larijani, former president of Parliament, considered a moderate.The official reasons for the refusals are unknown, since the Guardian Council he is not required to justify their choices publicly.

The candidacy of former president Ahmadinejad was not admitted

In any case, it is quite clear that the institution tends to discard the most reformist candidates.In the 2021, he had only accepted seven names out of 592 that they had gone against, and even in that case the orientation had clearly gone in favor of markedly conservative personalities.One of them was Raisi himself, who he was elected in the first round, although with aturnout very low at the polls, equal to 49 percent:the worst figure since 1979.

Elected for four years, the president plays a particularly important role as he guides the government and the political line of the nation:it is in fact a sui generis body, in the absence of a prime minister.However, he is not the head of state in Iran but remains the Supreme Leader or, currently, Ayatollah Ali Khamnenei, who has held the role for 35 years now.