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TEHRAN (AFP) - Conservative bureaucrat Farah Khosravi announced she will become the first woman ever to run for the Iranian presidency in next year's polls, press reports said Tuesday. The unmarried 41-year-old, who has twice failed to win a seat in parliament, will stand in May's elections as a member of the Jamiateh Iran Farda (JIF) party, the government-run Iran newspaper said. The JIF or Community of Tomorrow's Iran, partisans of supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, officially endorsed her as their candidate, the paper said. Khosravi, a physical education official at Iran's science and technology ministry, will be facing stiff opposition from popular incumbent President Mohammad Khatami, who won nearly 70% of the vote when he took office in 1997. "It's perhaps very clever of the conservatives to present a dynamic young woman as a candidate, particularly because Khatami is very popular with women voters," political analyst Iraj Rashti told AFP. "It remains to be seen if this is just a symbolic gesture by the party, and if the clergy can accept a woman in such a key election," he said. The Iranian constitution specifies that the president must be "elected from among religious and political personalities" but scholars quoted in Monday's press indicated this could easily include women. Analysts have been predicting that the leading conservative candidate in the polls would be Ali-Akbar Velayati, a close advisor to the supreme leader. Khatami, who is reportedly planning to stand for re-election although no official announcement has been made, has seen his reform supporters triumph in municipal and parliamentary elections since he came to office. The president's moves to ease social restrictions and forge greater political freedoms have made him a popular chief executive, particularly among women and Iran's enormous youth population. His brother Mohammad-Reza, leader of the Islamic Iran Participation Front (IIPF), was the pro-reform standard bearer in February, when reformers ended the longtime conservative majority in the legislature. But since then, the president has seen every major pro-reform newspaper shut down by the conservative-controlled courts, depriving him of one of his greatest political tools. Khamenei issued a rare decree earlier this year banning the new reform-majority parliament from debating a bill to roll back curbs on the press that were used to shut down the papers. Meanwhile, the stagnant economy is also expected to hurt Khatami at the polls. Despite the fact that inflationary pressures have eased somewhat, unemployment remains high. |
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