Political maneuvers of the pilot
Political maneuvers of the pilot
I have repeatedly emphasized that implementing the law is our responsibility. We should not write laws that cannot be enforced. If we do, we are the first lawbreakers ourselves. The first obstacle to the rule of law in society is the legislator itself, and this is absolutely unacceptable.
At first glance, it seems these words were spoken by Masoud Pezeshkian, the President of Iran, who is currently facing calls for resignation from internal radicals. However, the speaker of these words is none other than Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the Speaker of the Islamic Consultative Assembly. This immediately raises the question in the audience’s mind: how much time is there between Wednesday evening, December 7, 2023, and Saturday morning, January 1, 2024, that this politician has once again changed and this behavior and speech should be interpreted as instability or, God forbid, inconsistency.
From Wednesday evening, December 7, 2023, when Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf confidently declared to reporters that he himself would announce the Hijab and Chastity Law on December 23, to Saturday morning, January 1, when he emphasized the necessity of enforceable laws at a meeting of top researchers, only 24 days have passed. What happened in these 24 days that he changed his position? Did he think the President would relent, and when he saw the Speaker of the Assembly determined, he decided to act so as not to fall behind?
But why would Pezeshkian agree to say something that, if he hadn’t, they wouldn’t have let go and he would have lost his social base? Was Ghalibaf’s goal to gain concessions, perhaps with some positions intended to be given to his friends and like-minded individuals in a spirit of consensus? And because this didn’t happen, he took that stance, or conversely, because it did happen, he reconsidered?
Recall that on the same morning, during a public session of the Assembly and in response to a representative’s reminder, he considered the appointment of Mohammad Javad Zarif as the Strategic Deputy of the President to be contrary to the Law on Sensitive Positions and subtly suggested Zarif step down, even though he had returned to the government at the President’s request or order before the cabinet was introduced.
Part of the issue, of course, relates to Mr. Ghalibaf’s personality and temperament, which sometimes seems to lack the necessary or sufficient independence of opinion for this position. It is enough to remember that in the era of the Islamic Republic, Hashemi Rafsanjani sat in this seat for nine years, and it was well-known that power was where he was, followed by Mehdi Karroubi, whose 15-year house arrest remains a political issue, and news of another Speaker of the Assembly’s meeting with him receives widespread attention. The current Speaker of the Assembly is naturally not on the same level or reputation as Mr. Nategh Nouri.
Even compared to Gholam Ali Haddad Adel, the Speaker of the Seventh Assembly, he does not meet the necessary standards, and naturally, he is far from Ali Larijani, who sat on this throne for 12 years. It is clearly evident that Ghalibaf is not of the parliamentary type, which is why he has tried four times to become President and has failed each time. In the spring of 2005, he saw himself as the President of Iran, and when the game changed in the final days, he stayed out of sight for a while and returned to the scene as the Mayor of Tehran, still nurturing dreams of the presidency. If he did not run in 2009, it was because the entry of the last Prime Minister of Iran changed the level of the game, elevating it to a competition between him and the incumbent President, leaving no place for him.
Four years later, however, with no news of the last Prime Minister, who was now under house arrest, and no news of Ahmadinejad, he returned to the scene for the second time and showed through strategic mistakes, such as his debate with Dr. Velayati, that he had not gained enough experience after eight years. With Rouhani’s skill in creating a dichotomy with Saeed Jalili, he effectively fell out of the race. In 2017, when he came to make amends, he was finally asked to withdraw in favor of the late Ebrahim Raisi. When they had even reached out to Tataloo to defeat Rouhani, it was not unexpected for Ghalibaf to be forced to withdraw. Rouhani accelerated his rhythm this time and won again, remaining President, although he faced the consequences of Trump’s withdrawal from the JCPOA.
In 2021, he did not run because he was not supposed to, but in 2023, following the sudden helicopter crash of the President, he remembered his old ambitions, chasing the presidency from the age of 44 to 64 and never quite reaching it. If he were a literary person, he might recall Sadegh Hedayat’s saying that life is a lifetime of running and never reaching.
Although some viewed his participation in the early 2023 elections as a positive move to break the votes of Pezeshkian’s rival faction and create discord in the radical principlist camp, which this time bore the title of the Revolutionary Front, the day after the first round, on the morning of July 9, 2023, by declaring support for Saeed Jalili, he ended this optimism. While he could have returned to the role of Speaker of the Assembly and refrained from taking a stance for or against the two candidates who made it to the final as a member of the Interim Presidential Council formed in the absence of the late President, he once again made a miscalculation.
Ghalibaf can be described as having not only a thirst but also a haste, and it is not unlikely that his position on December 7 was due to this rush and haste. Yesterday, he spoke differently because that thirst and haste were not at play, or he realized it was to his detriment, further damaging his credibility and popularity.
Regarding haste, recall that in 2012, while the names of approved candidates had not yet been announced, he criticized the candidacy of the late Hashemi Rafsanjani with harsh words, forgetting the days when he was a commander of a part of the Revolutionary Guards during the war, and Hashemi Rafsanjani, as the Deputy Commander-in-Chief, was his senior commander. This behavior was unlike that of Commander Soleimani, who continued to show military respect to the late Hashemi even after the war.
Nevertheless, since Masoud Pezeshkian did not have a direct confrontation with Ghalibaf in the television debates, his image was somewhat repaired after the elections, especially as he showed support for all the proposed ministers during the vote of confidence. This gave the impression that the alliance of Ali Larijani and Hassan Rouhani during the JCPOA era was being repeated in the era of consensus.
However, Ghalibaf suddenly changed course on December 7, which seemed strange for a pilot who should be careful of air pockets and choose the right and precise path, although those who have followed and monitored his words and actions over the past 20 years were not surprised. Apart from the hypothesis of seeking and gaining concessions and the view of instability and inconsistency or thirst and haste that troubles the political commander, several other points should not be overlooked. First, his behavior is like that of television presenters who have one ear to the earpiece, which is why presenters who did not do so were eliminated.
People like Adel Ferdosipour, Soroush Sehat, and perhaps Ehsan Alikhani and even Ali Zia. On the other hand, the presenter’s eyes must be on the camera and know which camera they are speaking to. Mr. Ghalibaf also spoke with one camera on December 7, probably to please the radicals, and with another camera on January 1, facing the majority of people who resist the humiliating and objectifying hijab law. Although he can justify that on December 7, he took a stance as the Speaker of the Assembly and from a legal position because the law passed by the Assembly and approved by the Guardian Council must be announced if the President refuses, his personal opinion is separate. However, if this is the case, why did he not protest during the negotiations, and why did he not use his influence?
Another possibility is that he considered the President to be more serious and determined not to back down and preferred to return to the previous track. Now, he repeats the President’s rhetoric that no law should be written that cannot be enforced. The reality is that the mature Iranian society has moved beyond the stage of submitting to any humiliating law just because it is passed by a minority parliament. Just as the satellite ban law has become obsolete, as one political activist put it, if civil society and political and civil activists had backed down, perhaps representatives with a total of less than a million votes would dream of enacting restrictive and, to put it mildly, ridiculous laws away from the public eye every day. Mr. Ghalibaf has realized this important point and has moved away from his previous perception.
Beyond these guesses and possibilities, the reason for the Speaker’s change in behavior can be attributed to the situation being more complicated than to want to provoke Iranian girls and women over headscarves in the sensitive and special regional conditions and on the verge of Donald Trump’s return to the White House, while the government has no choice but to increase energy prices and eliminate a significant portion of cash subsidies.
The unstable regional conditions, amid threats from Israel and possibly the US after Trump, with the possibility of more maneuverability for a neighboring country in the region, necessitate supporting the President. In short, Mr. Ghalibaf has realized that he should not provoke Pezeshkian because the President does not have any sewn garments or cases to worry about losing them. They cannot force him to remove Zarif and enforce the humiliating hijab law while expecting him to perform economic surgeries without tension because the smoke of tension will not only irritate the Pezeshkian government.
When in December 2017, people in Mashhad, incited by radicals, chanted death to Rouhani to blame Hassan Rouhani for the financial and credit fund scandals, the Islamic Republic newspaper immediately warned that the death to Rouhani slogan would not be limited to Hassan Rouhani alone and cautioned the clergy against aligning with it.
Ghalibaf has likely realized that in the domestic situation of power outages, unemployment, and inflation, no one has the patience to provoke over headscarves. He knows better that the Assembly he chairs does not represent the majority of the Iranian people, and the situation has changed abroad as well, and repeating past statements leads nowhere. With this in mind, if less than a month later, Mr. Ghalibaf takes another stance or announces tomorrow that he did not mean the hijab law, we will not be surprised.
Our astonishment lies in an Assembly that, during the era of Pahlavi I, had figures like Modarres, Mossadegh, and Malek-o-Shoara Bahar sit on it, and during the Islamic Republic, representatives like Hashemi Rafsanjani, Bazargan, Dr. Yazdi, Mohammad Khatami, and Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari and Hassan Rouhani in the first Assembly, and figures similar to the majority of people in the sixth Assembly, and now its output is a law that even the Kayhan newspaper in quoting parts of it does not resort to crackdowns and brings parts to its Telegram channel that do not bear the mark of repression.
The level of play has changed, and if Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf wants to play a role, he has no choice but to change his behavior. Pezeshkian is not Ebrahim Raisi, but he is not Hassan Rouhani or Mohammad Khatami either, and Ghalibaf has likely realized this in less than a month.
