Iran’s intelligence minister announced that the regime had excluded candidates

Iran’s former intelligence minister has sparked a tit-for-tat scandal, sparking top-level interventions to determine who wins the presidency by sidelining some rivals.

Before the decision by the Guardian to exclude candidates from the reformist movement ordered by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei dried up, Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi testified to an earlier scenario looming in the current election.

On Monday, the Iranian minister revealed what happened in the presidential elections in 2013, when the late moderate candidate Ali Akbar Hachemi Rafsandjani, who died in 2017, was disqualified.

Moslehi said in a television interview that a report had been received by the Intelligence Ministry at the time, asking it to remove candidate Hachemi Rafsandjani from the presidential race; in which incumbent President Hassan Rohani won a first term.

Moslehi went on to explain Rafsandjani’s exclusion, or who gave the orders: “We monitored the opinion of the Iranian street and found out that he would win the presidential election, but his victory is not in the interest of the regime, and that is why we concluded that he should prevent their candidacy to maintain order.”

He continued with his stirring testimony: “In 2013, we discovered that Rafsandjani would win the presidential election, which is not in the interest of the regime, and I asked the Guardian Council to exclude him, and this is what happened.”

Former MP and reformist politician Mahmoud Sadeghi, in response to Heydar Moslehi’s remarks about his role in rejecting Rafsandjani’s eligibility in 2013, said: “With this report of the then Minister of Intelligence on the cost and benefit of endorsing or rejecting the eligibility of Hachemi Rafsandjani, we will likely see after a while a report on the cost and benefit of Hachemi Rafsandjani’s life and death,” repeating the regime’s accusation of killing the late president.

On 25 May, Iran’s Guardian Council banned the reformist candidates and their moderate allies and allowed seven candidates, five of them hardliners, to run in next Friday’s presidential elections.

Prominent reformist candidates, including former speaker of parliament Ali Larijani, Rouhani’s deputy Eshaq Djahanguiri, former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, former deputy speaker of parliament Masoud Pezeshkian and Tehran’s mayor Mohsen Rafsandjani, were disqualified.

Last Saturday, Ali Larijani, the candidate banned from the presidential elections, asked the Guardian Council (a body overseeing the candidates eligibility) to reveal the reasons for his exclusion.

Larijani described “reports” about him and his family as “false” in brief remarks to the Guardian Council 14 days after the announcement of the final candidates.

Larijani asked the Guardian Council to state “all the reasons behind his removal from the presidential election race in a clear and official manner”.

In response to the demand, Guardian Council spokesman Abbas Ali Kadkhodaei tweeted that the election law did not provide for “public disclosure of the reasons for disqualifying candidates from the elections.”