Iran's Speaker of Parliament, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, has issued a veiled warning to MPs after Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei forbade the "insulting" of high-ranking officials.
"I am confident,” Ghalibaf told the chamber, “that all members of the majles (parliament) will henceforth keep what the people tell them and the people's complaints against the executive in their chests. Turn it into an effort to move all the executive sectors of the country, prioritizing economic issues."
He went on: "[Representatives] have been holding the government accountable to parliament and the people through outspoken and soft-hearted criticism, by monitoring and controlling the budget, and by enforcing laws that have been suspended.”
Last week Ali Khamenei denounced criticism of President Hassan Rouhani as "false". In response to recent calls from MPs for Rouhani's impeachment, he stated, "You have the right to criticism, but criticism is different from insult" - which in turn, he said, was "forbidden".
Khamenei has also asserted that Rouhani's government should continue until the end of his term, regardless of the circumstances and even if Rouhani states his intent to resign.
The announcement was made presumably to give the impression of continuity and stability, even in the direst conditions. Khamenei has warned reformists in parliament off trying to unseat Rouhani on several occasions in recent months.
This is not the first time Iran’s elected representatives have been pressured to remain in post. In 2004, some 120 reformist MPs tendered their immediate resignation after the Guardians Council barred nearly 2500 out of about 8000 candidates from the upcoming parliamentary elections – including 87 incumbents and allies of then-President Khatami. In the aftermath, then-speaker Mehdi Karroubi said the move was against protocol, while the Supreme Leader decried it as both illegal and forbidden in Islamic law.
Years of Obstruction and the Rise of the Ruling Order
The non-impeachment of Rouhani is the latest in a string of episodes that illustrate the incapacity of Iran’s elected parliament. Under both Ali Khamenei and Ruhollah Khomeini before him, MPs have repeatedly been attacked and obstructed in the course of their duties.
Iran’s current Supreme Leader knows this first-hand. While Khamenei was serving as the third President of Iran from 1981 to 1989, during his second term he nominated Mir Hossein Mousavi to be prime minister against his will and at the behest of Ruhollah Khomeini. Some 99 MPs then refused to vote for Mousavi, which disrupted some of the following sessions of parliament. At some of these hearings, physical altercations took place between MPs.
The Supreme Leader at the time intervened by attacking members of the dissident faction in parliament. These MPs had also wanted to see Ali Akbar Velayati, Khamenei’s original choice of prime minister, deselected over a recent visit to Iran by a US delegation. But Khomeini’s intervention led to the group becoming isolated in parliament. "Your tone is sharper that of Israel,” he told them. “It is sharper than the tone of the nobles. What made you so harsh? You were not like this before.”
In 1989, after Khamenei became Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic, left-wing MPs again tried to divest Ali Akbar Velayati of his title of foreign minister: this time over a visit to Iran by Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. Khamenei shut down the attempts, and two MPs, Ali Salehabadi and Ebrahim Asgharzadeh, were subsequently arrested for continuing to press the issue in parliament.
The first use of a “ruling order” – similar to the executive order in the United States, which can bypass normal processes to push for a particular outcome – took place in Iran in July 2000. A reformist-backed amendment to Iran’s stringent press law, which had been used to shut down more than 20 independent newspapers since 1997, had been on the parliamentary agenda. But then-speaker Mehdi Karroubi cancelled it, citing a letter from the Supreme Leader ordering that it be removed from proceedings.
During the seventh sitting of the majles in the mid-2000s, another ruling order by Khamenei blocked the impeachment of Morteza Haji, the minister of education in President Khatami’s cabinet. In the next parliament the Supreme Leader also issued directives that MPs should support Mahmoud Ahmadinejad both privately and publicly.
In the eighth parliament, the Supreme Leader of the Islamic Republic issued a ruling order supporting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad both publicly and privately. He later stopped Ahmadinejad from obeying a summons by MPs for questioning and after the contested 2009 election result, urged MPs to vote in support of the proposed new cabinet. Without this order, the deputy speaker of Iran’s parliament later revealed, eight of the cabinet ministers would not have won a majority.
Interventions by the Supreme Leader came to a head after the United States withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action in 2018. Khamenei ordered a committee to be drawn from the heads of Iran’s three branches of power, the executive, legislature and judiciary, to decide on economic issues over the heads of MPs. The approval of the 2020-21 budget was also carried out by a ruling order rather than a vote in parliament, and was described by an MP for Tehran, Mahmoud Sadeghi, as “the last nail in the coffin” for parliamentary sovereignty.
Now members of the eleventh session have been forced to cast aside calls for Rouhani’s impeachment or questioning – and have even been told to modify their language in the chamber. In the present climate, Iran’s body of elected representatives appears to be little more than an instrument to enforce the will of the leadership of the Islamic Republic.
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