Reformist groups offer to campaign for Raeisi: Candidate’s campaign chief

Ebrahim Raeisi’s campaign chief says some Reformist groupings — normally rivals of the Principlist camp — have contacted him and offered to campaign for his boss.

Ali Nikzad said at a press conference on Tuesday (June 1) that “certain political, Reformist groupings that are within [the boundaries of] the [Islamic] Revolution have come to me and asked to campaign for” Raeisi. Nikzad did not say which groups had offered support.

Raeisi, the current head of the Iranian Judiciary, is associated with the Reformists’ arch-rivals: the Principlists. Before he announced his presidential bid, he faced numerous calls by the Principlist faction to run and was already considered its best bet, despite a failed campaign against incumbent Hassan Rouhani on a Principlist ticket in 2017.

But announcing his bid last month, Raeisi surprised political observers and many of his supporters by saying that he would be running as an “independent,” attempting to lend his campaign non-partisan overtones. And earlier, his campaign announced a plan to open a popular branch to organize his “Reformist and Moderate supporters.”

The Reformists’ top candidate, current Vice President Es’haq Janangiri, was disqualified by Iran’s Constitutional Council from running. And Iran’s main Reformist bloc said it would have no candidate in the election as a result.

But one of the approved candidates, namely Mohsen Mehr-Alizadeh, is considered to be a Reformist figure. And another, Nasser Hemmati, is closely associated with President Rouhani and, by extension, the Reformist camp. And there have been reports more recently that the Reformist bloc, Iran’s Reform Front, is open to studying Mehr-Alizadeh and Hemmati’s presidential agendas, in what may lead to its official recognition of the two candidates.

Mehr-Alizadeh has reportedly already written to the Front’s chief to request a meeting and present his plans.

President Rouhani, who is politically affiliated with the Reformists, clashed with Raeisi on state TV during the 2017 campaign. But they later worked together as the heads of the two branches of the Iranian government.