The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), and the People’s Mujahedin of Iran (PMOI / MEK Iran), reported that the government hosted the third set of televised debates between the thoroughly vetted presidential candidates for the approaching sham election on Saturday.
Like in the prior debates, officials heavily implicated in the regime’s corruption and crimes turn against one another in order to survive the show. However, unintentionally, the candidates acknowledged and exposed deep-seated corruption within the regime.
“In one case, $30 billion dollars were allocated to be distributed as cash handouts to the people. It’s not clear what happened to the money,” Amir-Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi added.
Alireza Zakani confessed that regime officials were involved in corruption, mismanagement, and misleading the public. “We’re faced with astronomical salaries, astronomical money [embezzlement cases], and astronomical lies! If Pinocchio was a real thing, the nose of some of these gentlemen would run four rounds around the planet.”
Former Revolutionary Guards commander Mohsen Rezaee acknowledged that “there’s so much thievery and rent-seeking” in government bodies that if it were solved, it could give “4.5-million-rial cash handouts” to the people.
The regime has set up “public sessions” events in which supporters encourage people to vote in the forthcoming election with the intention of persuading voter turnout. However, these sessions have effectively devolved into a demonstration of intense anti-regime sentiment and a lack of interest in voting for any of the candidates.
A young man took the microphone during one of these sessions in Ahvaz, Khuzestan province, and proclaimed, “they’re telling us to vote.
It is already clear who will be the president. You’ve already posted Raisi’s photo there. I work at the fruit and vegetable market. They came to the market. There are 120 shops. They charged each shop 20 million rials.
They forced us to pay. That’s 2.4 billion rials. They said it’s to help Raisi’s campaign. Does the president need financial aid? We shouldn’t vote.
We are living in Iran. I swear to God, we can’t breathe in Iran. I’m a youth and I’m struggling to cover the expenses of my family… Why should we vote at all? Don’t vote.”
The discussion of the brutality of dissidents and protesters is one topic that the regime has strictly avoided in the debates.
The candidates were particularly careful not to mention the regime’s slaughter of 1,500 protestors in the November 2019 uprising or the death of 30,000 dissidents in 1988, in which Ebrahim Raisi, the supreme leader Ali Khamenei’s favored nominee, played a crucial role.
The Iranian people, on the other hand, have not forgotten the regime’s crimes. Despite the threat, they continue to expose the regime’s crimes and urge for a boycott of the sham elections.
“In honor of the blood of Saro and all the martyrs of the struggle for freedom, I will not vote,” the mother of Saro Ghahremani, a youth killed by the regime’s security forces during the 2017-2018 protests, stated in a video message.
“For the blood of my son Reza and all the victims of the November 2019 protests, I will never vote for the Islamic Republic,” Mahmoud Moazami, the father of Reza Moazami, a youth gunned down by security forces during the 2019 protests, said in another video. And I’m appealing to you, dear fellow, to join us in this effort.”
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and People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran – MEK IRAN – YouTube
