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Iran Elections 2013: Does the President even Matter?
(Al Arabiya) Saffiya Ansari - As Iran's elections draw near, the six candidates are upping the ante, participating in televised debates and nationwide tours in a bid to win the vote and secure their place as the country's next president. In Iran, however, the president is not the final decision-maker, and it is the only state in which the president does not have control over the armed forces. Instead, Iran's political structure, including its executive branch, is ruled over by a supreme leader, currently Ayatollah Khamenei, whose position is not decided by a popular vote. Khamenei rules on the basis of vilayet-e-faqih (Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist). This essentially means he is given custodianship of the people by divine right. "The constitution gives a range of functions to the supreme leader that relate to 'supervising' the presidency," explains Sasan Aghlani, a researcher at London-based think-tank Chatham House. "In this sense there's nothing in the constitution that prevents the supreme leader from intervening if he believes the president to have acted against Iran's vital interests." "There's an understanding in Iran that the Ahmadinejad presidency seriously deteriorated Iran's international relations," said Dr. Arshin Adib-Moghaddam, author of the book Iran in World Politics: The Question of the Islamic Republic. It is therefore "no coincidence" that three of this year's election candidates - Ali Akbar Velayati, Saeed Jalili and Hassan Rouhani - "come directly from Iran's foreign policy establishment," he said, adding that the next president will be key to adequately reconstructing the country's flagging foreign relations. The president's key role in brokering diplomacy with the outside world is just one reason why the position matters, Adib-Moghaddam said.