All the candidates for the parliamentary election must be assessed and approved by the Guardian council according to Mahmoud Alavi, President Rouhani’s minister of intelligence.

In a speech in Mashhad on Thursday, Alavi said: “When a person is qualified, then they will be able to compete for a seat in the parliament as a representative, therefore it is important that they are qualified because we are talking about the rights of over 80 million Iranians.”

He went on to say that the “will” of his ministry is to “closely cooperate with all the election officials including the Guardian Council.”

“We will not intervene in the field of elections, because that is a violation of people’s rights. The main issue for the Ministry of Intelligence is national unity and national security, not party interests,” Alavi claimed.

Less than a month ago, President Rouhani stated that the best election in the history of the Islamic Republic was the first parliamentary election because in that election “there was no supervision as it is today and there was no Guardian Council and all these supervising offices.”

As the parliamentary elections in Iran draw near, discussions over the qualification of candidates and supervision of the election by the Guardian Council have intensified.

According to the revised constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Guardian Council is accorded the supervision of the elections.

The 11th parliamentary election in Iran comes at a time when economic problems and the police-state atmosphere have caused numerous uprisings since December 2017.