A group of students from Isfahan University boycotted Iran’s controversial presidential elections on June 18, according to a statement posted on the university’s Progressive Students Telegram channel.
This is likely the first open announcement of a boycott of a particular group in Iran after the unelected Guardian Council restricted voters’ choices by disqualifying three key candidates. A newspaper close to the core of the regime wrote that the outcome of the election one month before the June 18th elections was more or less known.
The statement, released on May 27, said: “People are fed up with the economic hardship” and the political situation where participation is impossible unless activists “risk their lives and freedom”.
Several exiled groups have also announced their boycott of the poll, and the Freedom Movement of Iran, a 60-year-old political party that supported the Islamic Republic for the first time, has announced that it will not vote.
The Iranian media are surprised that there is very little or no campaigning a few weeks before the election, possibly because there is no real competition between the seven candidates, five of which are from the same camp and the other two are not officially supported by any political Group.
Although the umbrella organization of Iranian reformists, The Consensus Institution, as well as individual reformist parties have stated that they have no candidate for election, individual reports from Tehran say that some of the key elements in the right of the central executives of The Construction Party are trying to others To convince party members as well as like-minded people in the reformist camp to rally behind the former governor of the central bank, Abdolnasser Hemmati, who happens to be one of the founders of the party.
Hemmati took part in a very popular clubhouse conversation with well over 10,000 participants on Saturday evening, in which several political figures and journalists spoke in his favor. During the conversation, Hemmati proved to be a good speaker and a man with ideas about politics and the state of the economy. However, he was unable to answer difficult questions about the human rights raised by activists.
Meanwhile, two statements by the hard-line candidate, former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, sparked controversy over his track record in media freedom. First, during an interview with the national radio station Javan, he said he was surprised to hear that Twitter is banned in Iran and Instagram is not. Twitter has been blocked by Iranian internet censors since 2009.
In a second statement during a speech, Jalili said, to cover up his mistake, “There is no justification for filtering Twitter.”
Like many Iranian officials, including those who strongly support Internet censorship, he has used both Twitter and Instagram, apparently with illegal anti-censorship software.
In another development related to social media, the election’s chief justice chief Ebrahim Raeesi (Raisi) appointed former communications minister Reza Taghipour, whom Iranian internet users called an enemy of the internet, as its campaign manager for and for social media. Taghipour’s nomination brought a flurry of criticism against Raeesi, even among his staunch supporters. Taghipour was behind many of the bans and restrictions placed on social media over the past decade. He said in 2011: “The Internet is dangerous for human societies.”
Meanwhile, disqualified candidate Saeed Mohammad has expressed his support for Raeesi, and Raeesi’s campaign posted the picture of the two men together to gain support among Mohammed’s fans.
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