Mohammad Ali Afshani Becomes Mayor of Tehran

About a month after the sudden and newsworthy resignation of Mohammad Ali Najafi, the Tehran City Council elected Mohammad Ali Afshani as the mayor of the capital with 19 votes in favor on Sunday, May 12. According to Iranian media, in the council session, Samiallah Hosseini Makarem received only one vote, and one council member (Ahmad Masjed-Jamie) cast a blank vote. In the past month, initially seven individuals and then four, including Mohammad Ali Afshani, Mahmoud Hosseini, Samiallah Hosseini Makarem, and Pirouz Hanachi, were selected as candidates for the mayoralty of Tehran, and ultimately, the city council members chose two as the main candidates. Mohammad Ali Afshani, 59, was the governor of Fars during Hassan Rouhani's first government and was appointed as the Deputy Minister of Interior and Head of the Municipalities and Rural Districts Organization at the beginning of Rouhani's second term. According to Fars News Agency, Mr. Afshani is a reformist politician and a member of the central council of the 'National Trust Party' and has previously served as Deputy Minister of Education and Deputy Governor in Khuzestan, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad, and Semnan provinces. Mr. Afshani's activities will begin after the Minister of Interior issues his decree, and he will replace Mohammad Ali Najafi, who stepped down about a month ago in a high-profile event. Mohammad Ali Najafi was elected as the mayor of Iran's capital on August 10 last year, and in a report he presented to the city council in December of that year, he accused former mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf and his managers of issues such as 'spending municipal budget on presidential elections', 'sudden hiring of 13,000 people on the eve of elections', 'betrayal in the municipal employees' savings fund', and 'arbitrary transfer of 674 properties'. Following that, reports emerged about increasing pressure on Mohammad Ali Najafi to resign, especially after he attended an event where several children were dancing, leading to him being 'arrested in his sleep and forced to resign'. After much back and forth, the Tehran City Council finally accepted his resignation on April 10. Mustafa Tajzadeh, a political activist, implicitly attributed Najafi's resignation to pressures from Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his associates, and some news sources also mentioned 'pressures from the Intelligence Organization of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps' as the reason for the Tehran mayor's resignation. Mohammad Naeimi-Pour, a member of the 'Unity of Iranian Nation' party, and Bahareh Arvin, a city council member, also stated without naming names that 'a security agency' had previously threatened that if Mr. Najafi accepted the position of mayor of Tehran, 'cases from his past activities would be referred to court'. Morteza Alviri, a member of the Tehran City Council, also cited 'significant pressures' as the reason for Mohammad Ali Najafi's resignation. Mohammad Ali Najafi and several members of the fifth city council had accused former managers of Tehran's municipality from the beginning of their tenure of 'national corruption' and 'extravagance'. Besides the issues raised in Najafi's 'first day report', Yashar Soltani, a journalist in the urban field, also referred to parts of the accusations attributed to Tehran's municipality during Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf's term, including tens of billions of tomans in donations to specific Hosseiniyehs and mosques. However, in recent weeks, reports have emerged indicating the continuation of this trend during Mohammad Ali Najafi's mayoralty as well. For instance, Yashar Soltani reported last December that Tehran's municipality under Najafi had provided 1.5 billion tomans to a famous mourning committee. Recent reports have also shown that Tehran's municipality allocated more than 22 billion tomans in 2018 for 'culturalization of value-based activities and insight enhancement'. Details of the 2018 budget of Tehran's municipality, published on the website of this organization, indicate that in addition to the budget for supporting religious committees, there is a budget line titled 'insight enhancement', and 13.5 billion tomans have been allocated to the Basij Organization of Tehran's municipality. In this context, Tehran's municipality will spend 22 billion tomans this year on 'insight enhancement'.