MADRID, 21 May. (EUROPA PRESS) –
The ultraconservative cleric Mohamad Ali Kermani was elected this Tuesday as the new president of the Assembly of Experts of Iran, the body in charge of electing the country’s supreme leader, a position held since 1989 by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Kermani, 93, has been elected for a three-year term in the first session of the body after the parliamentary elections and the Assembly of Experts held on March 1, a meeting that comes just one day after the death was confirmed. of the country’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, in a helicopter accident.
The Assembly of Experts has thus begun its sixth eight-year mandate since the Islamic Revolution of 1979 with the election of Kermani, who thus replaces the also ultra-conservative Ahmad Yanati, 97 years old.
The body is made up of 88 Shiite clerics, although two of them, Raisi and the leader of the Friday prayers in Tabriz, Mohamed Ali Ale Hashem, died in the aforementioned plane crash on Sunday in East Azerbaijan (northwest), an event in the that Foreign Minister Hosein Amirabdolahian also died.
During the session, Khamenei highlighted that the Assembly of Experts is “the paradigm of Islamic democracy” and asked “to pay attention to the comprehensive and stable plan of Islamic governance,” according to the Iranian news agency Mehr.
Raisi’s death has opened an interim period in Iran ahead of the holding of new presidential elections, already set for June 28, and has been a setback for Khamenei’s own succession efforts, given that the late president was listed as one of the main favorites for the position.
