Purification Without Retouching
Purification without retouching has set aside considerations, and those who until recently spoke of the necessity of unity and reducing differences in the conservative camp are now drawing bold lines of distinction to make it clear from today that they do not intend to be under a single list. Even if they end up under one list, they will not do so without significant shares. Recent electoral rallies have well publicized the existing divergence in the conservative camp.
On one side, Haddad-Adel stood alongside his two allies, Ghalibaf and Zakani, while on the other side, Masouli gathered his supporters to both determine the government’s course under the pretext of supporting Raisi and to warn other conservatives. The Unity Council members also gathered to raise the flag of the Tehran election headquarters.
The Command Room of Purification in the Government
Regardless of what transpired in all three meetings and the signals each conservative faction sent to the others, what drew the most attention were the remarks of Sadegh Masouli at the Stability Front meeting and Morteza Agha-Tehrani affirming the purification project of this front.
Sadegh Masouli, speaking from his position as the Secretary-General of the Stability Front at the meeting of this organization, quickly and while defending the swift and eliminative actions of his like-minded faction, demanded that the government speed up its purification process. He explicitly stated that the government has weaknesses, the main one being that some individuals present in the government, like the president himself, are not transformative in thought and action, yet they remain in the government. We expect and demand from the government to swiftly replace such individuals with efficient revolutionary forces and not to be swayed by accusations like purification. Unfortunately, today, the repetition of the word purification has become a code name for attacking meritocracy.
Meritocracy or Purification, That is the Question
The meritocracy Masouli refers to should be seen as another side of the fitness in the ideological view of the Stability supporters, where he emphasizes this point by posing a question: Why are some afraid of meritocracy and choosing the more fit and deserving individual? In recent elections, they have repeatedly disrupted unity in the conservative movement by resorting to the keyword ‘fit,’ which was injected into this radical political organization by Mesbah Yazdi, and have turned towards seeking shares, sidelining many moderate revolutionaries and credible political figures with this perspective.
Accordingly, meritocracy should be considered a polished and reshaped term for the same fitness, under which the same eliminative thinking of the Stability supporters is intended to continue, and the cleansing started at the upper and middle management levels in various institutions is to reach the lower levels as well, with its command issued by the faction supporting the government.
In this electoral meeting, Masouli considered purification as a label for this front and said we should not be afraid of labels like purification and the like. Those who say these things are contradictory, sometimes saying the Stability is no more than a bus, and sometimes saying they have taken over the entire country.
Meanwhile, critics of this thinking have repeatedly emphasized that the number and size of the Stability supporters are not significant, but the power they hold is due to their influence in key institutions of the system, which has become considerable and indeed dangerous. The eliminative thinking and purification pursued by this movement have moved in a direction that not only does not tolerate reformists but also sees the rational and moderate conservative spectrum as an obstacle in their path and is striving to remove this ideological spectrum from official politics.
Agha-Tehrani’s Trace for Parliamentary Purification
If Masouli’s project at the head of the Stability Front is defined as aiding the purification process in Raisi’s government, Agha-Tehrani, the head of the Central Council of the Stability Front, who leads the Stability Front in parliament, has endorsed his and his faction’s performance in the parliament and has unveiled this front’s project for the upcoming elections. He has also unabashedly defended the radicals’ performance in advancing plans like protection, but the important point is where he said that if our numbers in parliament were greater, we could work better—a meaningful and frightening statement about the projects of this radical faction for the future parliament.
By proposing the idea of forming a more revolutionary parliament than the current one, he has, along with other radicals like Raefi-Pour, showcased the purification thinking of this movement, indicating that the project to remove Ghalibaf and his moderate allies, independents in parliament, and the few reformists is the ideal that this front is pursuing.
A project that seems to have been pursued in recent days by the executive boards of the government, where the influence of the Stability supporters has been significant, and the next phase is to pressure supervisory institutions to align with this purification project.