Iran has rigged its election to favour Ebrahim Raisi, a hardliner

a bad sign when one of the few memorable moments in a presidential debate is an admission that the ballot is rigged. The candidates in Iran’s spent much of the televised event, held on June 8th, criticising an incumbent who is not even on the ballot. Perhaps they felt there was little to discuss: most are hand-picked conservatives put there to lose. It fell to Mohsen Mehralizadeh, a former provincial governor of little note, to point out the obvious. The regime, he said, had aligned “sun, moon and the heavens to make one particular person the president”.There are no free elections in Iran, where clerics wield ultimate authority and candidates may be disqualified for the flimsiest of reasons. Even by these standards, though, the presidential election scheduled for June 18th is shaping up as a farce. Nearly 600 candidates applied to replace Hassan Rouhani, who took office in 2013 and is barred by term limits from running again. The Guardian Council, a group of clerics and lawyers who vet candidates, allowed only seven on the ballot.