Party will boycott Iranian election

Iran’s largest pro-reform party has lost hope that free and fair parliamentary elections can be held as scheduled on February 20 and will boycott the polls, its leader said today.

Mohammad Reza Khatami, the party leader and brother of the Iranian president, said his Islamic Iran Participation Front would not field any candidates.

“With an overwhelming majority of the votes, our party decided not to participate in the elections. We have no hope for the possibility of free and fair elections. All legal opportunities have been killed,” he said.

Nearly all of the Front’s candidates have been barred from running in the election – some of them sitting lawmakers, including Khatami, who is also deputy speaker of parliament.

Without the Front, hard-line candidates would probably step uncontested into enough seats to retake control of parliament. Reformists had won the parliament in 2000 for the first time since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and used it as a platform to press for social and political reforms.