Opposition leader recognizes Ahmadinejad as president

Mehdi Karroubi

Mehdi Karroubi, Iranian opposition leader announced today that despite his dispute against the elections, he recognizes Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as “head of the regime’s government.”

His son, Mehdi Karroubi told Fars news agency that his father recognizes Ahmadinejad as the president because the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei has passed the order of presidency onto him.

He added that his father still firmly believes that the ballot was “rigged” and that there was “interference” in the vote count.

After Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was announced as the winner of the June presidential elections, the other candidates disputed the result and people took to the streets in millions to protest what they called the "theft" of their votes.

Two disputing candidates, MirHosein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, along with several prominent figures of the establishment boycotted Ahmadinejad's inauguration ceremony and refused to recognize the legitimacy of his government.

The government has tried to put down protests through widespread arrests and violent confrontation with protesters.

Mehdi Karroubi, who came fourth in the disputed June presidential elections, has been one of the staunchest critics of the government’s crackdown on election protesters in the past seven months. While he has been the target of repeated verbal and physical attacks by government supporters in the past months, he has consistently expressed defiance in the face of these pressures and presented himself as a champion of people’s demands.

Yesterday he announced: “We are standing and will not back off from defending people’s demands which are nothing but the original demands and reforms of the Islamic Revolution.”

Hosein Karroubi insists that his father’s statement is not a retreat from his previous positions but rather, in line with MirHosein Mousavi’s 17th statement, “it is a search for a path out of the current situation created by the government, which is leading the country toward a precipice.”

In his last announcement, senior opposition figure, MirHosein Mousavi called for the accountability of the government vis a vis the people, the parliament and the judiciary. He added that “if the government is effective and rightful, it could obviously be accountable to the people and the parliament. If not, the parliament and the judiciary will confront it in the framework of the constitution.”

Some have interpreted this statement as an official recognition of the current government.

The opposition leaders, who are themselves part of the Islamic Republic establishment, have been struggling to keep the recent protests within the framework of the constitution despite the efforts of extremist factions to portray them as a foreign-backed conspiracy to topple the system.