Tehran, IRNA – It has been merely three days since Vice-President Javad Zarif returned to Tehran from an official trip to Davos, Switzerland — a rare appearance by the veep in quite some time. But he has had to deal with so much already.
Given the topics he spoke about in Europe, not to mention the trademark prominence of his rhetorical skills, Zarif’s usual detractors were unlikely to let the opportunity slip by.
A number of lawmakers had already mounted a challenge to have the Iranian vice-president for strategic affairs removed from his position. That challenge cites a law that prohibits individuals who hold foreign citizenship or whose immediate family members hold such citizenship from holding sensitive posts.
Zarif’s children acquired U.S. citizenship when they were born while he was a student in the United States decades ago. Under U.S. law, birth in the United States alone qualifies an individual for U.S. citizenship. Zarif and his family have long since returned to Iran.
Leader of the Islamic Revolution Ayatollah Seyyed Ali Khamenei has effectively endorsed an attempt by President Masoud Pezeshkian's administration to reform the law so that it accommodates the recruitment of individuals whose children did not acquire foreign nationality by choice — as in Zarif’s case.
Even in spite of Ayatollah Khamenei’s tacit stance, Zarif’s opponents — who often claim the strongest affinity with the Leader — continue to use the law as it is to squeeze him out.
And so, when Zarif said in an interview with Fareed Zakaria of CNN that the Iranian government — all three branches of it — had decided to exercise leniency with regards to women not covering their hair in public according to Islamic rules, it was certain that all hell would break loose on the Iranian official.
In an editorial in Kayhan daily, Hossein Shariatmadari, a deeply conservative voice, called Zarif the real “architect of America’s sanctions” on Iran. Parliament’s Committee on National Security and Foreign Policy in an unofficial statement described Zarif’s remarks as being “in line with the plot and divisive schemes of the enemy.” And a small number of people picketed before the Presidential Complex in Tehran with banners that called Zarif a “coward,” “wimpy,” “an infiltrator,” etc. One read, “To the Judiciary! Iran shall not become Los Angeles.”
A seasoned politician and former diplomat, Zarif is unlikely to take the scorn for much. But he may be concerned about the pressure that is exerted indirectly on the Pezeshkian administration.
And of course, though the apparent motive for the protest was Zarif’s remark about hijab, the Iranian vice-president is aware that a comment he made about another Iranian politician, Sa’eed Jalili, is more likely to have caused the ruckus.
Most of the voices that have since been raised in opposition to Zarif are associated with Jalili, a member of Iran’s Expediency Council who ran, once, against Pezeshkian in the 2024 presidential election and another time against former President Hassan Rouhani and was defeated both times.
“If today, instead of President Pezeshkian, you had [a] President Jalili, you might have had a major war in the region,” Zarif told Zakaria, complimenting the Pezeshkian administration for its less rigid foreign policy.
For Jalili’s staunchest allies, some of them pushing for Zarif’s removal at Parliament, it must have rekindled memories of a distressing past.
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