Kadkhodaei Visits Election HQ

Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, spokesman for the Guardian Council, arrived at election headquarters at 3pm to meet with officials of the Ministry of Interior. After the meeting, Kadkhodaei gave a speech in which he said “those who register for this election must provide documents contained in the Guardian Council’s resolution on candidates, otherwise their eligibility will not be checked”. Kadkhodaei’s comments were likely an indication that Mostafa Tajzadeh’s registration will be disqualified by the Ministry of Interior and not even considered by the Guardian Council. The timing of Kadkhodaei’s visit also may have been in response to rumours that Mohammad-Javad Azari Jahromi, the Minister for Communications who was barred from this election, was due to arrive at 3:30pm in order to register in defiance of the Guardian Council.

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Guardian Council: Women Can Run for President

Spokesman for the Guardian Council, Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, stated that women are permitted according to the law to run for President, and that they were subject to the same vetting of candidates as men. However, Kadkhodaei’s comments were ambiguous, because he only said that women were allowed to register to run for President. While this implies a woman can become President, he stopped short of explicitly saying so. 

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Tejarat Covers Women Candidates

Tejarat published an analysis on the possibility of women candidates in this election. In previous elections, women have been able to nominate but have never been approved, partially due to the wording of the Constitutional law on the criteria for President, the meaning of which is in dispute. Last year, a spokesperson for the Guardian Council, Abbas-Ali Kadkhodaei, said that women were not excluded by law, although it has been unclear whether this was his personal opinion or that of the Guardian Council. So far, two women, Faezeh Hashemi Rafsanjani and Sara Fadaei, both academics, have announced their candidacy, but the analysis also speculated that several other women might nominate. These include Elham Aminzadeh (former Vice President for Legal Affairs), Masoumeh Ebtekar (Vice President for Women and Families), Shahindokht Molaverdi (former Rouhani cabinet member), Zahra Nejad-Bahram (Tehran city councillor), and Marzieh Vahid-Dastjerdi (former Ahmadinejad cabinet minister). Faezeh Hashemi is the most prominent to nominate so far, although she does not expect to be approved: “Since I have a prison record, and am facing another case and a sentence, I will definitely be disqualified. But since I believe in women registering for elections, I will do so symbolically”.

Read full analysis on Tejarat

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