DM Monitoring
TEHRAN: Iran’s presidential candidates have once again clashed during their third and final televised debate, this time, more openly, especially over the country’s 2015 nuclear deal with world powers and United States sanctions.
The seven men, five conservatives and hardliners, a moderate and a reformist, leveraged the slightly improved “debate” format to speak more directly and at length about the corruption and misguided management that they believe has led the country astray.
After most candidates criticised the previous two debates that incorporated no moderation and saw them not answering the same questions, state television began the final event by posing one question, on people’s problems, to all participants.
Several candidates discussed the need for an overhaul in the management style of the government in addition to fighting corruption and supporting marginalised Iranians, once again without providing many details on how their plans would actually be implemented.
But most notably, much more time was spent on the nuclear deal, or the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), and the harsh sanctions that the US has imposed since 2018 when former President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew his country from the landmark accord.
The issue had been largely ignored during the previous two debates as Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei had said last month foreign policy is not one of the “main problems of the people”. But moderate candidate Abdolnaser Hemmati, who led the central bank until earlier this month when he was dismissed for running for president, harshly criticised the internal political forces who oppose the JCPOA.
“What will happen if power falls in the hands of hardliners?” he directly asked Ebrahim Raisi, who leads the judiciary and is seen as the frontrunner in the polls. “I have no reservation to say there will be new sanctions with more international consensus,” he said in reference to the pre-JCPOA period, when Iran was under multilateral sanctions.
The technocrat warned that Raisi and other like-minded politicians do not want sanctions lifted as it would cut off forces inside the country who are profiting from them, and said “all this time you played in Trump’s court with your hardline actions.”
He also railed against those who oppose ratifying remaining legislation to complete Iran’s financial transparency action plan with the intergovernmental Financial Action Task Force (FATF).
