Former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, disqualified from running in the June 18 presidential election along with almost all other prospective candidates, claimed on Wednesday the brutal Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) told him to “keep silent and cooperate” if he wanted to avoid losing more than just his presidential aspirations.
Ahmadinejad, president of Iran from 2005 to 2013, attempted his second comeback bid for the top office by filing as a candidate this year. All but seven of the 585 applicants were rejected on Tuesday by the Guardian Council, a religious body that “vets” political candidates.
Most of the approved candidates are hardliners friendly to the Iranian theocracy while leading reformist candidates such as former parliamentary speaker Ali Jarijani and Vice President Eshagh Jahangiri were summarily disqualified. The leading approved candidate, judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi, is a cleric who might be on his way to succeeding 82-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Ahmadinejad was once on good terms with the Ayatollah – the theocracy blatantly rigged the 2009 election to keep him in power and murderously suppressed the resulting “Green Revolution” of outraged voters – but he has reinvented himself over the past decade as a fiery populist outsider critic of the government.
Getting his candidacy disqualified by the Guardian Council could be seen as the last step in Ahmadinejad’s political rebranding campaign, an insult he can brandish as proof the regime in Tehran is profoundly dysfunctional and hopelessly corrupt, Foreign Policy observed Tuesday.
With that in mind, Ahmadinejad’s claim that the IRGC tried threatening him into silence on Monday – the evening before his disqualification was publicly announced – could be taken with a little skepticism, although threatening and brutalizing adversaries of the theocracy is not exactly out of character for the IRGC.
Iran International on Wednesday quoted Ahmadinejad’s online statement about his disqualification, which vanished from his website for a while under murky circumstances but later reappeared.
Ahmadinejad said the IRGC chief of security for Tehran, Gen. Mohammed Hossein Zibainejad, threatened to not only take action against him but also arrest his supporters – a step the chief was ostensibly reluctant to take because he regarded them as holy warriors and good “revolutionary individuals.”
Ahmadinejad said he responded with a threat of his own: that his supporters will fight to defend him.
Ahmadinejad claimed he told the IRGC general that Iran is suffering from a combination of “weakness and treason,” and public confidence would be shaken even further by his unfair disqualification from the presidential race.
“The country’s situation is really bad. The economic situation is catastrophic and the social situation is on the verge of collapse. The system will fall in a way that it is hard to assume that it can rise once again,” he recalled telling Zibainejad.
“Why should they disqualify me? No one has the right to do that and I would never accept this or remain silent,” Ahmadinejad declared, suggesting he rebuffed the IRGC’s threats. “They can hardly explain that now but offering an explanation for my disqualification would be much more difficult in the future.”
“This society is on the verge of explosion,” he warned. “Those who are behind this disqualification should know that this will end in nothing other than the people’s confrontation with them.”
Ahmadinejad’s statement concluded by repeating his frequent threat to boycott the election and refrain from endorsing any of the other candidates, although he added that he would not urge his followers to protest in the streets. According to Iran International, Ahmadinejad has some clout, because polls allegedly showed he would have been one of the front-running candidates if he had not been disqualified by the Guardian Council.