Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Fast Facts
By Suman Gopal
Published: September 13, 2006
To the editor:
Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has taken up a fast to draw attention to the country’s human rights record. He will break it on Sept. 20.
The Constitution of Iran requires that candidates for public office be nominated by the government and the National Consultative Assembly (NCA), or parliament, with the support from the country’s voters. Candidates for the presidency must be nominated by two thirds of the members of the Assembly. Candidates are selected by the Assembly and are subject to the approval of the Supreme Leader, who acts as a head of the government.
The Assembly must be convoked by both houses of the legislature, and is the highest organ of state power. It acts with a limited but effective veto over presidential nominations, and its decisions have to be backed by the votes of at least a simple majority from both houses.
There are many ways in which the Assembly is limited in its ability to block presidential candidates. For example, since the Assembly cannot overrule the vote of individual legislators, the president is free to nominate any single candidate, whether he or she has been voted for by members of the Assembly.
Since presidents must be elected by the voters, a candidate nominated by the Assembly must win at least fifty percent of the votes of the assembly (which is about five thousand individuals). This means that the president’s nominees must generally be approved by the voters, or else he would face the charge of election fraud.
Although not as simple as it seems, the presidential system of government makes little distinction between the president and the parliament. This is because the president is also the leader of the nation, acting as a constitutional head of state. In addition, since both houses of the National Assembly can refuse to validate a presidential candidate, a president can still be selected by the voters alone.
In the case of Ahmadinejad’s nomination, the Assembly, not a single individual, has rejected his candidacy. Nonetheless, as one of the world’s leading democracies,