Euroviews. Iran's upcoming election is a mafia-style tussle of Khamenei's minions

Friday marks parliamentary election day in the Islamic Republic of Iran — or so the regime will want the world to believe. 

Cue the staged queues lining up at the ballot box ready to deliver their rehearsed script on “Islamic democracy” to international journalists, who will in turn flaunt their “rare and exclusive” reports in Iran. 

And while some mainstream media outlets in the West will no doubt fall into the ayatollah’s trap, polling day on 1 March is anything but a free and fair vote.

Of course, this will (hopefully) come as no surprise to many: there are no democratic elections in Iran. 

Rather, all candidates are pre-approved by the 84-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — who rules with absolute authority as God’s representative on Earth — and the outcome is manufactured to his taste. 

But even for the standards of the Islamic Republic, election engineering has been unprecedented this time around.

The lack of consequences for the Islamic Republic has meant the previously self-conscious Khamenei no longer cares what the world thinks of his regime. 

He has pulled off the veil of electoral “legitimacy” and exposed the naked totalitarianism of his regime.

In the process, we’ve witnessed mass disqualifications and even the boycotting of the vote by some elements of the Islamist left (often wrongly depicted as “reformists”). 

In turn, only the Islamist right — the social base of Khamenei and his all-powerful paramilitary force, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) — has been permitted to run for office.

But “electoral” competition, if we can call it that, isn’t between political parties. Instead, 1 March will be an insider patron-client fight, with various oligarchic clans competing to have the upper-hand