With the approaching Iranian parliamentary elections to be held on February 21, 2020, there are increasing calls for opposition organizations and parties as well as many groups of the Iranian people, to boycott these elections, to see that they will not do anything, but rather will come in the arms of the Iranian guide from the fundamentalists. This comes especially after the emergence of some evidence that there is a strong competition between the fundamentalist and reformist currents.
The elections come at a time when the Guardians Council is intransigent towards the candidates of the reformist movement and rejected many of their papers with false allegations, which was rejected by the Iranian President, Hassan Rouhani, demanding that the elections be made to include all currents, and not to leave a single stream in control.
Provincial claims
In this context, Iranian political parties and organizations issued a statement calling on the Iranian people to boycott the upcoming elections, because they see that they are formal elections and will not work for the benefit of the people, but rather they will worsen the Iranian situation under the rule of the Jurisprudence.
On February 8, 2020, the website “Iran International” published a statement of the opposition parties to the elections, as it included the “Iranian Republican Union, the Iranian Fedayeen Organization, and the Iranian National Front organizations outside the country.”
The statement stated that over the past four decades, the scope for political participation and passing the Guardian Council filter has narrowed, and that this process continued until the current elections in a more severe way. It stressed that the Supreme Leader Khamenei, the Revolutionary Guards, and fundamentalists decided to dominate and unify the vast majority in Parliament.
The statement pointed out that despite the crisis situations in the country, the system is not subject to political change in its performance but rather seeks to narrow the circle of power in order to unify it and tighten the security environment.
It is trying to establish parliamentary elections in a more formal way than before, in order to silence the last votes in Parliament, and approve the candidates who fall into “Khamenei” only, in order to enhance the influence of military, intelligence and security institutions in various political and social fields, and thus preserve their share of the country’s economic resources.
Therefore, the opposition parties demanded in their statement to leave the polls empty, and to boycott the elections, to strengthen the protest movement and to send another blow to the mullahs’ regime and take away its credibility more than ever.
It explained that boycotting the elections represents an appropriate opportunity to continue the protests and advance them to the level of an active and comprehensive social movement.
The opposition parties’ statement about boycotting the mullahs ’elections was not the first. It was preceded by many Iranian activists residing abroad, who issued a statement on February 6, 2020 calling on the people to boycott the parliamentary elections, and even demanding that they defend their rights through civil disobedience and not participate in the elections.
The statement was signed by 164 political and civil activists abroad and described the upcoming elections as “formal”, and indicated that there are about 70% of the electoral constituencies pre-designated with the engineering of the Al-Morshed Foundation, the Guardian Council, as well as the military and security forces.
Leader’s allegations
In response to calls for a boycott, and to what President Rouhani previously announced when he criticized the Guardian Council for targeting the reformist candidates, and demanded that he respects the people and allows different currents to participate in the elections.
The leader, Khamenei, in his speech on February 5, 2020, demanded that Iranian citizens refrain from submitting opposition votes and effective participation in the parliamentary elections. Khamenei defended the Guardian Council praising its integrity, and considered the upcoming elections to be the most honest in the world.
The failure of the mullahs policy
It seems that the Iranian people have realized what the guide and the institutions that support him are doing, especially after these institutions failed to solve the economic crisis that Iran has faced since the United States imposed economic sanctions on it, in addition to the regime’s continued imposition of austerity policy to solve its crisis.
Therefore, the Iranians have become aware of what is going on inside the Wilayat al-Faqih Foundation, and this is evident in a poll published by the news channel of the Iranian state radio and television; and conducted by the Iranian TV on February 6, 2020, via the Telegram application. It stated that 80% of the Iranians decided not to participate in the upcoming parliamentary elections, after 670,000 followers voted by refusing to participate in the elections.
In addition to the Iranian demand on Twitter on February 8, 2020, to boycott the elections and not participate in them, and to strongly confront the rule of the Faqih state, they published a hashtag of “prohibiting elections” and enclosed their demands with a caricature in which only the candidates of the guide came to participate in the elections, and the decision is settled from the beginning.
Therefore, it is expected that the upcoming elections will not witness a heavy popular presence due to the absence of the voices of some segments of society therein, due to the Iranian regime’s leadership in following the same approach based on prevailing interests in favor of the guide, his institutions and supporters only.
Source » theportal-center