TEHRAN: Former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has called for “free” presidential and parliamentary elections in an open letter to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Khamenei backed Ahmadinejad after his return to power kicked off protests in which dozens of people were killed and hundreds arrested, rattling the ruling theocracy, before security forces led by the elite Revolutionary Guards stamped out the unrest.
But a rift developed between the two in 2011 when Khamenei, who has the ultimate say over all policy in the Islamic Republic, reversed Ahmadinejad’s dismissal of the minister of intelligence and suggested he had overstepped his authority.
Ahmadinejad, a brash, populist hardliner while in office, could not run in the 2013 election as he had served the maximum two consecutive terms. He was succeeded by pragmatist Hassan Rouhani, who won election by landslide then and again last year.
While Rouhani has called for a liberalisation of the economy and society and on the Revolutionary Guards not to interfere in elections, he has stopped short of explicitly advocating checks on the Supreme Leader’s powers – something Ahmadinejad addressed in the letter to Khamenei published on his website on Wednesday.
“An immediate and essential need is the holding of quick and free elections for the presidency and the parliament, of course without the engineering of the Guardian Council and interference of military and security institutions, so the people have the right to choose,” Ahmadinejad wrote.
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