Iran’s Interior Ministry has announced that creating an independent committee to safeguard proper voting is “illegal.”
Solat Mortazavi told IRNA on Thursday that: “Islamic Iran has the best and strongest supervisory committee in the whole world, and nowhere in the world can you find a supervisory committee better than Iran’s regulatory system.”
The Guardian Council, Iran’s constitution watchdog, is the chief supervisory body for the elections, and its members are directly elected by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei.
MP Bahman Akhavan told Shargh daily: “It is natural for the MPs to want a healthy election and some of them, after the rise of disputes over the deviant current and the efforts of this group to influence the outcome of the coming parliamentary elections, they want to establish ways of making sure the elections are healthy and fair.”
The term “deviant current” is used by Iran’s conservative elite to refer to the allies of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and in particular his chief of staff, Esfandiar Rahim Mashai, and his followers. They claim this group is trying to “weaken the clergy and the leadership” in the Islamic Republic system.
The head of the Guardian Council has accused the so-called deviant current of “using large amounts of money to take over Parliament.”
