Members of Parliament have drawn up a Bill limiting the autonomy of four vice-presidents in Iran, after a row with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over his choice of a first deputy, Mehr news agency reported on Tuesday.
Under the Bill designed to allow parliamentary supervision, the four posts which hold Cabinet rank would become ministries, it said.
The posts targeted are the vice-presidents who head the Physical Education Organisation, Tourism and Cultural Heritage Organisation, Martyrs’ Foundation and the National Youth Organisation.
The latter would be integrated into a planned sports ministry, reducing the posts to three slots, Mehr said.
”The MPs behind the Bill believe that by turning these vice-presidential portfolios to ministries they would be accountable to the Parliament representatives,” the agency said.
”Out of 213 MPs present, 117 voted that the Bill be discussed as a priority.”
Unlike ministers, Iran’s vice-presidents are not subject to a vote of confidence or impeachment by Parliament. Under the Constitution, the president can have as many VPs as he sees fit, with the current number set at 11.
The move came after a political crisis over Ahmadinejad’s appointment of a controversial aide, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie, as first vice-president in the face of strong opposition even from his own hardline camp.
Ahmadinejad refused to budge until Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered him to revoke the appointment, but Rahim Mashaie was kept on as the president’s adviser and chief of staff.
Mashaie, a Ahmadinejad confidant who headed the Tourism Organisation over the past four years, drew the ire of conservatives in the Islamic republic by saying two years ago that Iran was a ”friend of the Israeli people”.
Ahmadinejad, who was re-elected in a disputed presidential poll on June 12, has named aides to the four posts which MPs want to have transformed into ministries and whose heads would have to be approved by Parliament. — Sapa-AFP