clowdynow

Please save your money.

There is absolutely no chance in hell that this guy is going to be approved as a candidate by the Guardian council.

These IAMAs sound absurd to any Iranian or anyone aware of the Iranian Presidency process. To put this in perspective, the odds of a gay communist Muslim becoming the next republican presidential hopeful are higher than him becoming a presidency candidate for Iran.

eclipse007 has said it much better than me:

He HAS NOT been approved by the Guardian Council. In fact NOT A SINGLE PERSON has been approved yet as registration is still ongoing. GC comes in after registration is over. He has however been disqualified last time he tried. As an Iranian I'm just fascinated by this guy's repeated attempts at presenting himself as a viable candidate on social media because simply there is not a chance in hell that the Guardian Council would approve of him. The most basic and primitive requirement to qualify for president is to transliterate"A [male] political figure". GC has repeatedly interpreted this as people who have been in lower levels of Iranian government and related organizations for a significant time and are extremely well known to the general populace. This is evident from every previous election. Just the fact that he's been out of the country longer than he's been inside alone is enough to disqualify him. Now add a 100 more criteria to that, each of which this guy will fail. His comments on this post (i.e. the views) are enough that if published in his name in Iran will land him in jail for a very long time, if he's lucky. I wouldn't go so far as to call him a fraud because I haven't yet figured out what possible benefit he can get from 45k Facebook likes and Reddit karma. To any Iranians who know what's going on, this is just surreal and perplexing.

On the question of authority, it is unfortunate that the outside world is miseducated about the power of the Supreme Leader. The President is the second man in command and he is in charge of implementing the Constitution and has tremendous power over the country’s finances as well as foreign policy. Yes, the Leader has tremendous authority, but the Constitution also limits his powers. In fact, if there was time here I could give you example after example showing that when the president wanted to take a step in a particular direction, he has been able to, despite sometimes opposition from the Leader. Any promise I am making is based on the Iranian constitution and the power of millions of people who will be voting for me to make me president. Please remember that for me to become president, I will at least need 25m+ votes. With that vote, the power of the president will be unmatched.

Bullshit. This is completely false. Khatami had the highest vote count behind him, and was crippled by the meddling of the regime.

The last election proved that the regime is not allowing free elections any more, and heavily changed and skewed the election results. You are not going to have half of the support or the following that Moosavi had, and you won't be elected even if you did.

I think this is just a publicity stunt to legitimize your position as an expert on Iranian politics and your consultancy businesses.

You are my new heroes.

Sorry, I don't have any questions.