The Pilot’s Political Turns
The Pilot’s Political Turns
I have repeatedly emphasized that the implementation of the law is our responsibility. We should not write a law that cannot be enforced. If we do, we become 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 sentences were spoken by Masoud Pezeshkian, the President of Iran, who is currently under pressure from domestic radicals seeking his resignation. However, the speaker is none other than Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the Speaker of the Islamic Consultative Assembly. Immediately, the question arises in the audience’s mind: how much time passed from Wednesday evening, December 7, 1403, to Saturday morning, January 1, 1403, that this politician has turned again, and should this be interpreted as instability or, heaven forbid, as inconsistency?
From Wednesday evening, December 7, 1403, when Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf puffed up his chest and stated in response to reporters’ questions that he would announce the Hijab and Chastity Law himself 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 had passed. What happened in these 24 days that he changed his stance? Did he think the President would back down, and when he saw the Speaker of the House determined, he took action to announce it so as not to fall behind?
But why would Pezeshkian have to concede to saying something that, if he didn’t, they wouldn’t let him go and he would lose his social base? Was Ghalibaf’s goal to gain concessions, and for example, were some positions supposed to be given to his friends and like-minded people in the form of consensus, and since it didn’t happen, he took that stance, or on the contrary, because it did happen, he reconsidered?
We should remember that on the same morning, in an open session of the Assembly, in response to a representative’s warning, he considered the appointment of Mohammad Javad Zarif to the strategic deputy of the presidency to be against the law of sensitive positions and subtly asked Zarif to step down, while he had done this before introducing the cabinet and returned to the government at the President’s request or order.
Part of the issue is related to Mr. Ghalibaf’s character and temperament, which sometimes seems to lack the necessary or sufficient independence of opinion for this position. We should remember that during the Islamic Republic era, Hashemi Rafsanjani sat in this seat for nine years, and it was 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, Nategh-Nouri, meeting him receives widespread attention. The current Speaker of the Assembly is naturally not on the same level or fame 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 in this position for 12 years. It is evident that Ghalibaf is not of parliamentary material, and that’s why he has tried four times to become President and has failed each time. In the spring of 1384, he saw himself as the President of Iran in advance, and when the game changed in the final days, he disappeared from the public eye for a while, and when he returned as the Mayor of Tehran, he still nurtured the dream of the presidency. If he didn’t run in 1388, it was because the game level changed with the entry of Iran’s last Prime Minister, and it escalated to a competition between him and the incumbent President, leaving no room for him.
Four years later, however, there was no news of the last Prime Minister, who was now under house arrest, nor of Ahmadinejad, and he entered the scene for the second time. With strategic mistakes such as debating with Dr. Velayati, he demonstrated that he had not gained enough experience after eight years. With Rouhani’s skill in creating a dichotomy with Saeed Jalili, he practically fell out of the race. In 1396, when he came to make amends, he was eventually asked to step aside in favor of the late Ebrahim Raisi. When they had even approached 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.
He didn’t run in 1400 because it wasn’t planned for him to do so, but in 1403, following the sudden helicopter crash of the President, he remembered his ambitions and sought the presidency again from the age of 44 to 64 but never achieved it. Perhaps if he were a man of literature, he would recall Sadegh Hedayat’s saying that life means running for a lifetime and never reaching.
Although some viewed his participation in the early 1403 elections as positive for breaking the votes of Pezeshkian’s rival faction and creating discord in the radical principlist camp, which this time had the title ‘Revolutionary Front,’ the optimism ended the day after the first stage, on the morning of July 9, 1403, when he announced his support for Saeed Jalili. While he could have returned to the role of Speaker of the Assembly and, as a member of the provisional presidential council formed in the absence of the late President, refrained from taking a stance for or against the two finalists, he once again made a miscalculation.
Ghalibaf can be described not only as eager but also as hasty, and it is not unlikely that his stance on December 7 was due to this haste and urgency. Yesterday, he spoke differently because that eagerness and haste were not at play, or he realized it was to his detriment and further damaged his credibility and popularity.
Regarding haste, let’s remember that in 1391, while the names of approved candidates had not yet been announced, he criticized the candidacy of the late Hashemi Rafsanjani with harsh words and forgot the days when he was a commander of a part of the Revolutionary Guards during the war, and Hashemi Rafsanjani was his senior commander as the Deputy Commander-in-Chief. This behavior was unlike that of Commander Soleimani, who continued to show military respect to the late Hashemi in the years after the war.
However, since Masoud Pezeshkian did not have a direct confrontation with Ghalibaf in the televised debates, his image was somewhat restored after the elections, especially as he showed support for the approval of all the proposed ministers. This gave rise to the perception that the alliance between Ali Larijani and Hassan Rouhani during the JCPOA era was being repeated in the era of consensus.
But Ghalibaf suddenly changed tracks on December 7, which seemed strange for a pilot who should be careful of air pockets and choose the path correctly and precisely. However, those who have followed his words and actions over the past 20 years were not surprised. Apart from the hypothesis of seeking concessions and gaining concessions and the view that sees instability and inconsistency or eagerness and haste as problematic for the political commander, several other points should not be overlooked. First, his behavior is like that of TV presenters who have an ear on the phone, and for this reason, presenters who were not like this were eliminated.
People like Adel Ferdosipour, Soroush Sehat, and perhaps Ehsan Alikhani and even Ali Zia. On the other hand, the presenter’s eye should be on the camera and know which camera to speak to. Mr. Ghalibaf also spoke with one camera on December 7, probably to appease the radicals, and another on January 1, facing the majority of people who, although they can justify it, are under the oppressive and objectifying law of hijab. He may explain that on December 7, he took a position as the Speaker of the Assembly and from a legal standpoint because the law passed by the Assembly and approved by the Guardian Council must be announced if the President refuses. But his personal opinion is separate. However, if this is the case, why didn’t he object during the negotiations, and why didn’t he use his influence?
Another possibility is that he considered the President to be more serious and determined than 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 past the stage of accepting any oppressive 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 who collectively do not even have a million votes would dream of enacting restrictive and, in some cases, ridiculous laws every day, and Mr. Ghalibaf has realized this and moved away from his previous perception.
Beyond these guesses and possibilities, the reason for the Speaker’s change in behavior could be that the situation is more complicated than to engage in a sensitive and specific regional situation 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, they do not want to provoke Iranian girls and women over the hijab, something even Mohammad Jolani did not start in Syria.
The unstable regional conditions, along with threats from Israel and possibly the US after Trump, with the possibility of more maneuvering by neighboring countries in the region, require supporting the President. In short, Mr. Ghalibaf has realized that he should not provoke Pezeshkian because the President has not sewn any clothes or bags to worry about losing them, and they cannot force him to remove Zarif and enforce the oppressive hijab law while expecting him to perform economic surgeries without hesitation, as the tension will not only affect the lungs of the Pezeshkian government.
When in December 1396, individuals in Mashhad, incited by radicals, chanted ‘Death to Rouhani’ to blame Hassan Rouhani for the financial and credit fund issues, the Islamic Republic newspaper immediately warned that the slogan ‘Death to Rouhani’ would not be limited to Hassan Rouhani and warned the clergy against aligning with it.
Ghalibaf has probably realized that in the current situation of power outages, unemployment, and inflation, no one has the patience to engage in a hijab debate, and he knows better that the Assembly he presides over does not represent the majority of the Iranian people. The external situation has also changed, and repeating past statements will not lead anywhere. Given these circumstances, if Mr. Ghalibaf takes another stance in less than a month or announces tomorrow that he did not mean the hijab law, we will not be surprised.
Our astonishment is at an Assembly where, in the era of the first Pahlavi, figures like Modarres, Mosaddegh, and Malek al-Shoara Bahar sat, and during the Islamic Republic era, representatives like Hashemi Rafsanjani, Bazargan, Dr. Yazdi, Mohammad Khatami, Mohammad Mojtahed Shabestari, and Hassan Rouhani in the first Assembly, and figures resembling the majority of the people in the sixth Assembly, were present. Now, its output is a law that even the Kayhan newspaper does not refer to the arrests in its excerpts and brings parts in its Telegram channel that do not have the mark of torture and punishment.
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 also not Hassan Rouhani or Mohammad Khatami, and Bagher Ghalibaf has probably realized this in less than a month.