Kurdish clerics to run for Iran’s influential assembly

ERBIL, Kurdistan Region— Six clerics from the predominantly Kurdish city of Urmia in northwestern Iran have officially announced their candidacy for the country’s powerful Assembly of Experts, according to Iran’s state media.

The clerics will represent Kurdish “voters’ interest” in an assembly which has far-reaching powers including selecting and removing the Supreme Leader, a post currently occupied by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei since 1989.

Kurdish voters in Sanandaj, Kermanshah, Lorestan are represented in the assembly by two clerics while Urmia and Ilam will have one and three representatives, respectively.

The growing role of the 88-seat assembly in domestic and foreign relations, ever since the death of the founder of Islamic Republic’s founder Ayatollah Khomeini, has been a major subject of debate inside Iran, with moderate forces critical of the assembly’s powers in policy-making.

All members of the assembly should be religious leaders, according to the constitution, which will “make sure the governing system is not in contrast in any ways to the Islamic philosophies.”

Late Kurdish leader, Abdurrahman Ghassemlou, was famously rejected a seat in the assembly despite winning an overwhelming share of the votes in 1980’s elections because of his non-religious background, officials explained.

On February 26, Iran will concurrently hold parliamentary elections with nearly 1,400 Kurds running for 38 seats in the country’s legislative body.

It is the first time the two bodies are elected simultaneously.

The parliamentary elections take place two years into the moderate president Hassan Rouhani who received large portions of Kurdish votes in 2013 and who promised more Kurdish participation in governance.  

Over 12,000 candidates will run for the 290-seat parliament (Majlis) which Iran’s media has called “unprecedented and historic.”

Government officials have said their policies in the past two years “have brought back hope to people” which they see as the reason behind the increased number of candidates.

But Kurdish activists see the relatively large participation of Kurds in the elections as a response to the “inability of Kurdish political movement in Iran,” which they accuse of being “too fragmented and without an agenda.”

“Iran’s Kurdish political parties which currently reside in Iraq’s Kurdistan region, have failed to fill the intellectual vacuum in Eastern (Iran) Kurdistan, which has led people to turn to elections as a substitute,” a Kurdish journalist in Iran said, requesting anonymity.

The parliament has 285 directly elected members and five seats reserved for the Zoroastrians, Jews, Assyrian and Chaldean, Christians and Armenians.