Top Iranian hard-liner Ali Larijani announced yesterday that he was entering the race to become the Islamic republic's next president, while a report said top pro-reform cleric Mehdi Karoubi would also be standing. Larijani, 47, is also a former head of Iran's state-controlled broadcast media and one-time top member of the powerful Revolutionary Guards, the regime's ideological army. He currently represents supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the Supreme National Security Council and also sits on the Expediency Council, the country's top political arbitration body.
Karoubi, 68, is the former speaker of the Iranian parliament, or Majlis, which fell into the hands of hardliners after most reformists were barred from contesting the February 2004 polls. He is a close ally of incumbent reformist President Mohammad Khatami, who is nearing the end of his second consecutive term. The constitution bars presidents from serving more than two consecutive mandates. The student news agency ISNA said Karoubi had officially accepted the nomination of his party, the Assembly of Combatant Clerics, during a meeting yesterday. He is expected to make a formal announcement in the coming days.| You might be a fundamentalist theocracy if......your "pro-reform" candidate is a member of the Assembly of Combatant Clerics. I s'pose he is a proponent of the "Church Muscular." |
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