After the Guardian Council, the body that oversees the elections, declared the six qualified candidates for the Iranian regime’s presidential elections, it became clear that the regime has very limited maneuvering space in the upcoming elections.
While the regime is trying to put up a show and warm up the stage for the elections, the regime’s media is ridiculing the pointless bickering over the disqualifications and the next stage of the farcical elections.
In the meantime, however, the regime’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, and his top confidants know well that the problem or their calamity is not the election crisis, but the crisis of the regime after the death of regime president Ebrahim Raisi.
On June 4, Khamenei in a speech at Raisi’s tomb, spoke about the irreparable disaster of losing him, who had no differences with him in the policy of repression, contraction, and warmongering. He said: “This calamity was indeed a great tragedy for the country… We had personalities who served the country before, but not to this extent, not with this volume, not with this quality… In foreign affairs, he used opportunities in the best way…”
The same severity of the blow and the disaster inflicted on the regime is depicted by Majlis member Mojtaba Zonnour, who compared the regime’s situation to 1981 and said on June 7: “This is not the first incident, and we hope it will be the last. The Islamic Revolution has passed through various events and very dangerous turns… If any of the incidents of 1981 had occurred in any other country, the political system of that country would have collapsed.”
Regarding this, Khamenei’s website writes in an article titled “The God of 1981 is the Same God of This Year”: “If the country grew and flourished in the heart of those crises and wounds, while its official and legal structures were not yet fully formed, it will also emerge with pride after bitter and tragic events such as the loss of Haj Qassem (Referring to Qasem Soleimani the IRGC commander) and Mr. Raisi.”
Much has been said about consoling the regime’s demoralized forces after the fall and death of Raisi, but it seems that Khamenei and his appointees have drawn the opposite conclusion from comparing the current crisis with the conditions of 1981. Because in this way, they show that the crisis gripping the regime is not the “election crisis” and appointing a substitute for the fallen appointee, but the “regime crisis,” facing the peril of overthrow. In this comparison, they implicitly point to the alternative and the serious force threatening the regime.