When Iranians elect a new parliament and Assembly of Experts on Feb. 26, they will find their choices circumscribed: nearly all the reformist candidates and many pragmatists were disqualified. “The elections are not free and fair,” but even so they are important indicators of trends among powerful factions, says Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, a scholar of Iranian politics at Texas A&M University. Reformist leaders, he says, are urging Iranian voters to come out to block the most hard-line candidates. Supreme Leader Ali Khameini, too, is urging high turnout to demonstrate that “despite all the factional rivalries in Iran, the regime as a whole has popular legitimacy,” Tabaar says.
http://www.cfr.org/iran/why-irans-elections-matter/p37573
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