With less than a month to go before the elections – the campaign is only three weeks long to make things harder for the opposition – it is now clear who the candidates are, and all those disagreeing with the dominant faction have been vetoed by the six-member Guardian Council. This council is controlled by the country’s real ruler, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But the complex maneuvers leading up to the election have given him a huge political headache.
The core of the problem is that there are three factions. Khamenei doesn’t want two of the factions – the super-hardliners and the reformists – to win, but only the third group, his hardliners.
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