Election masquerade settled with the regime’s contraction
Maryam Rajavi described the elimination of Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani as a candidate in the clerical regime’s election masquerade upon the personal directive of the regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, as a horrific rupture and extreme internal purge at the pinnacle of the mullahs’ regime. She said the move will both shrinks and fracture the regime’s power base, and aggravate as never before internal tension and discord, thus expediting the regime’s unraveling and overthrow.
Rajavi added that this move was an inevitable self-inflicted political suicide by Khamenei, which reflects the complete contraction of the ruling theocracy as it reaches its end. It demonstrates that there are no solutions within this regime and affirms the legitimacy and the imperative of the regime’s overthrow and the boycott of its elections, which the Iranian resistance has long pursued.
She stressed that the rejection of Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s preferred candidate Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei will also irreparably spread factional discord and fissures and feuding to the regime’s rank-and-file.
The disqualification of Hashemi Rafsanjani, who played a decisive role in propelling Khamenei to the position of the Supreme Leader, is scandalous within the clerical regime, and will discredit and delegitimize the regime as a whole, even among its innermost circles. As the Chair of the Expediency Council, Rafsanjani is a Khamenei personal appointee and as a member of the Assembly of Experts, has a say on the fitness of the Supreme Leader in the framework of the clerical regime.
Khamenei had no choice but to eliminate both candidates because his efforts and threats to prevent their candidacy had failed. In doing so, he is trying in vain to forestall the regime’s overthrow through contraction and the purging of his rivals. What he has failed to see is that the windfall gains of the Kuwaiti war in 1991, the war in Afghanistan in 2001 and the invasion of Iraq in 2003 have receded and, as the regime continues to become more centralized, will paradoxically accelerate the regime’s overthrow.
Rajavi once again called on Iranian people to boycott the sham election unanimously and reiterated: Now, more than ever, after this major purge, any engagement with this regime would only serve to worsen the regime’s suppression of the Iranian people, the drive to acquire nuclear weapons, and the export of fundamentalism and terrorism, and fueling of the fires of war in the region.
The Iranian Resistance’s President-elect called on the Iranian people, especially women and youth, to protest against the mullahs’ election masquerade, which is nothing but a blatant usurpation of the Iranian people’s rights to sovereignty.
Secretariat of the National Council of Resistance of Iran
May 21, 2013
