«Long live spring, long live Iran!». With these words, pronounced in front of around fifty journalists, Mahmud Ahmadinejad he returned to the scene promising to seek “constructive engagement” with the world and improve economic relations with all nations.
The ultra-conservative former Iranian president presented on Sunday his candidacy for the presidential elections on June 28th in Tehran, surrounded by a crowd of supporters. The fingers in a V in a sign of victory, the waving of the Iranian flags around him, they made the blood freeze in my veins of those who remember when in 2005 he stated that Israel was destined to be “wiped off the geographical map” and that the Holocaust was just a “myth.”
As mayor of Tehran, between 2003 and 2005. he closed all fast food outlets, forced municipal employees to wear a long beard. Once elected president resumed the atomic research program, suspended two and a half years earlier by Khatami. And in 2007, her performance in front of the astonished students of Columbia University when she supported that “there are no homosexuals in Iran.”
President from 2005 to 2013, Ahmadinejad managed to antagonize practically every sector of Iranian society, from the ultra-conservative one to which he belongs to the reformist one. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei considered him “like a son” but he eventually turned against him, putting himself at odds with the power of the Pasdaran. After the 2009 elections, he bloodily repressed the revolt of those who accused him of having defeated his opponents Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi with fraud. Everyone in the world remembers theGreen Waveone of the most impressive protest movements in Iranian history, the 4,000 or more arrests, the deaths, at least a hundred of them including Neda Agha-Soltan, the Iranian student killed in the street and who soon became a symbol of the movement.
Ended up under investigation by Parliament for his management of government affairs, the first to suffer such shame in the history of the country, he left the scene in 2013 with the election of Hassan Rouhani. Then the return, the increasingly obvious conflicts with the leadership, including the 2017 candidacy opposed by Khamenei himself, repeated unsuccessfully four years later. Lastly, last year at the height of the protests over the death of Mahsa Amini challenged the regime by explaining in a video that «the money spent to suppress people they should instead be spent on solving the country’s problems.”
Now we have to see if June 11th the Council of Guardians, the powerful control body that has the task of selecting the final candidates will allow the former president to run in the elections called after the death of Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash on May 19th. Raisi, 63, had been president of Iran for three years, in a context of strong international tensions and widespread internal demonstrations and repression, with the explosion of the Women’s Life Freedom Movement.
I’m beyond that 34 candidates stepped forward to take over from President Ebrahim Raisi who was killed in the helicopter crash on May 19th. Among them Ali Larijani, former president of Parliament, a moderate, the ultra-conservative Saeed Jalili, Zohreh Elahian, the former MP who Canada sanctioned for supporting the death penalty for Mahsa Amini movement protesters. There is also the Minister of Culture and Islamic Orientation, Mohammadmehdi Esmaili, the same one who announced that actresses who appeared in public taking off their hijab can no longer work.
