Iran appoints ultra hardliners to monitor next parliamentary elections

Elections are an empty exercise in futility in Iran. It's a complete sham and IR's crowning achievement in the art of manufacturing perceived consent a la Chomsky. It is appalling to watch this mass deception taking place in the name of democracy year after year.

Iran, remember, is at best a quasi-democracy: in parallel with the elected system exists another system that is unelected. Its elements include the armed forces (especially the Revolutionary Guards), the Council of Guardians, the judiciary, the senior conservative clerics and a vast administrative machine that reports directly to the supreme leader. By and large this unelected system is made up of strong believers in the original ideology of the revolution, or at least people who have a strong vested interest in it. A common self-description of these people is that they are osoulgara, or “principle-oriented”.

What people often forget when they’re hoping for some muddle through reform, is that it doesn’t matter what the people think, because in Iran, sovereignty derives not from the people, but from *Ayatollah Khamenei’s conception of God (God is the legislator and his representative is the Supreme Leader), and therefore, he doesn’t care what the people think, and he has the Revolutionary Guard in place to make sure that they don’t get out of line. " In a clerical theocracy , the true will of the people, who are the true source of all sovereignty, and the only legitimating base for any state doesn't have to be considered given the definition and the laws inherent in a theocracy and to expect it to behave otherwise is something that will never be and never was; it's nothing short of fantasy.


In fact, the most powerful faction (Mesbah Yazdi,Supreme Leader of ignorance, and Ahmadinejad) in Iran would like nothing more than to get rid of these elections once and for all. According to Mesbah Yazdi, people are ignorant and too dumb to know what's good for them.

Four ultra-hardliners within Iran's ruling establishment have been appointed to a panel monitoring the next legislative elections, the official IRNA news agency reported Sunday, raising fears of foul play in a key vote that could determine the shape of presidential elections a year later.

Ultra-hardliner Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati and three other conservatives viewed as radicals within Iran's Islamic establishment in power since the 1979 Revolution were appointed as members of the panel monitoring legislative elections due next March, the official IRNA news agency said.
Their nomination by Iran's constitutional watchdog, the Guardian Council, sparked fears of mass disqualification of candidates for the race, as was the case in 2004. The four will steer a committee that oversees the elections and approves thousands of other monitors across the country.

The nomination came amid an ongoing power struggle between reformists _who want more overture to the West and less clerical say in running the country_ and hardliner conservatives who want clerics to maintain complete control over government matters.

The Guardian Council is a powerful oversight body dominated by hard-line clerics that must approve all parliamentary legislation to become law. It also monitors presidential and parliamentary votes.