After a heated parliamentary session Nov. 16, Iranian lawmakers refused to provide a vote of confidence to Masoud Fayyazi, who had been proposed by hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi to run Iran’s Schooling Ministry.
The 46-year-old conservative jurisprudence knowledgeable fell brief by 16 votes of the required threshold of approval from half of the 260 current lawmakers.
The vote got here as little shock. It was preceded by an internal meeting of the parliament’s Schooling Committee the place Fayyazi’s nomination was rejected over his “lack of expertise.”
“He has not even labored as a principal at a small major college within the remotest cities and is [thus] incapable of finding out the academic system’s issues,” stated conservative parliamentarian Jalil Rahimi forward of the vote. The assertion echoed rising considerations in regards to the nominee’s “incompetence” already raised by different politicians, critics and lecturers.
A minimal five-year educating expertise is required by Iranian law for the place of a faculty principal. With such a rule strictly utilized to formidable lecturers, many Iranians puzzled how within the absence of the wanted background, Fayyazi had nonetheless been proposed by the president.
In a last-minute tackle to parliament, Raisi tried in useless to avoid wasting his choose, declaring that Fayyazi had crushed some 20 other contenders.
A former deputy of the Iranian Parliament’s Analysis Heart, Fayyazi is believed to have acted as one of many key architects of a contentious bill geared toward imposing extreme curbs on Iran’s social media.
Throughout these very social media platforms, the Fayyazi nomination additionally stirred up a parallel debate on favoritism. Many identified his household affiliation with Alireza Zakani, Tehran’s hard-line mayor and a detailed ally of the president.
The no-confidence vote marked a impasse over the destiny of the very important Schooling Ministry place, which has remained vacant since Raisi’s inauguration in August. After the voting session, Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf suggested the Iranian president to promptly give you his new nominee.
Whoever turns into the subsequent schooling minister, they must brace for a mess of challenges. The pandemic-hit nation has seen its colleges nearly completely shut for almost 20 months, throughout which the poor infrastructure for the choice online learning scheme has uncovered severe deficiencies.
Subsequent to that, the brand new schooling minister might be overwhelmed with amassed calls for expressed in latest nationwide sit-ins by hundreds of lecturers, whose livelihood is being relentlessly squeezed by strains of Iran’s sanctions-hit, battered financial system.
