Iran begins first election campaign since protests over Mahsa Amini’s death

Candidates for Iran’s parliament began campaigning on Thursday in the country’s first election since the bloody crackdown on the 2022 nationwide protests that followed the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in police custody.

State television said 15,200 candidates will compete for a four-year term in the 290-seat chamber that hardliners have controlled for two decades.

That is a record number and more than twice the candidates who contested the 2020 election, when voter turnout was just over 42 per cent, the lowest since 1979.

Amini died on September 16, 2022, after her arrest by Iran’s morality police for allegedly violating the country’s strict headscarf law that forced women to cover their hair and entire bodies.

In the severe crackdown that followed, over 500 people were killed and nearly 20,000 arrested, according to human rights activists in Iran.

On Wednesday, the Guardian Council election watchdog sent the names of the 15,200 qualified candidates to the

interior ministry.