Ahmadinejad Cabinet Insanity Continues

Safar Harandi

Reports are coming in that the Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance Safar Harandi has resigned. Ahmandinejad has already fired his Minister of Intelligence and had apparently also wanted to fire Harandi, but did not do so fearing that would force a vote of confidence with parliament. Apparently Harandi in his letter of resignation said that Ahmadinejad did not want him to serve so he would not show up to his post on Monday. The importance of this is that this resignation theoretically should force a vote of confidence in parliament over Ahmadinejad's cabinet.

Article 136 of the Iranian Constitution deals with the removal of Ministers:

"The President can dismiss the ministers and in such a case he must obtain a vote of confidence for the new minister(s) from the Assembly. In case half of the members of the Council of Ministers are changed after the government has received its vote of confidence from the Assembly, the government must seek a fresh vote of confidence from the Assembly."

There are 21 Ministers in the Presidential cabinet and during Ahmadinejad's first term 11 have been removed or resigned. That means that more than half of the ministers have changed so a new vote of confidence is needed from parliament to legitimize the government. The legal status of the Ahamdinejad administration is not clear and it is in a sort of limbo until the vote happens in the parliament. It is not clear if or when parliament will take up a new vote because this has never happened in the history of the Islamic Republic.

It is important to note that Ahmadinejad's new term is set to begin in just eight days so all this drama from his first term is going to end soon anyways. Even if this current crisis is not resolved, Ahmadinejad will be saved in a way because of his new term. However, all the Ministers for his second term must be approved by the parliament even if the same person is keeping the same position. Clearly this can lead to some very tense and important battles for key ministries as the process goes forward. Moreover, Ahmadinejad would have needed a vote of confidence to approve his new cabinet anyways for his second term.

The whole insanity within Ahmadinejad's cabinet and VP choice shows us what happens when laws and the constitution are not respected. When an election is so clearly stolen, all the supposed rules and regulations governing the government also go out the window. What we are seeing right now is an anarchic situation in which all the hardliners are trying to make power grabs without regard to the law. The whole point of happening votes of confidence by parliament is to set up a Western style system of Checks and Balances, but such a system does not make sense in a dictatorship. When elections don't matter, then democratic institutions they select such as the Presidency, Cabinet, and Parliament lose their meaning and function.