Woman floated as hardline candidate for Iranian presidency

Iran may have its first ever female presidential candidate in May’s presidential elections, as hardliners seek to rally around a consensus candidate as a challenger to the relative moderate incumbent, Hassan Rouhani.

One name that has been floated is that of Marzieh Vahid-Dastjerdi, a gynecologist, former parliamentarian and Iran’s first female minister since 1979’s Islamic Revolution, having served as minister of health and medical education in 2009-2013 under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Vahid-Dastjerdi, 58, is currently the spokeswoman for the Popular Front of the Forces of the Islamic Revolution, a group that seeks to focus conservatives’s support on a single candidate in order to defeat Rouhani.

While she has dismissed rumors of her potential candidacy as “untrue,” Vahid-Dastjerdi has recently emerged as a vocal critic of the president, saying over a week ago that “the nation deserves a much better government than the Rouhani administration,” the semi-official Tehran Times reported.

Despite the growing speculation surrounding Vahid-Dastjerdi’s potential candidacy, it is unclear if she would even be allowed to run, as the country’s Guardian Council, a powerful legal body composed of Shiite jurists and clerics, has previously prohibited female candidates from participating in elections.

However, the Guardian Council made waves in December when it said it may consider changing its definition of “statesmen” from its strictly masculine interpretation, which would allow women to compete in presidential elections for the first time, according to Tehran Times.

While some hardliners have said she could be a “good rival for Rouhani” and that it makes no difference that she is a woman, others have suggested talk of Vahid-Dastjerdi as the conservative faction’s potential candidate is the work of rumors spread by supporters of Rouhani to divide hardliners, according to a Radio Free Europe report on her possible candidacy.

While some Iranians have praised the possibility of a Vahid-Dastjerdi presidency as a step forward for women in a country where women lack many rights afforded to men, others have pointed to her past support for gender-segregated hospitals and her opposition to Iran becoming a signatory to the United Nation’s Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women as signs she may instead seek to further reinforce existing state-backed discrimination of women, the report said.

Iranian journalist Ehsan Mehrabi told Radio Free Europe that despite the intrigue surrounding Vahid-Dastjerdi’s potential candidacy, it is unlikely religious conservatives would allow such a dramatic move.

“The presence of women in important political posts has always been a red line for conservative clerics,” he said, adding, “[I] doubt that the Guardians Council would be willing to cross one of its red lines, even with the goal of splitting Rouhani’s votes.”