Grand National Alliance (Iran)

The Grand National Alliance (Persian: اتحاد بزرگ ملّی, romanized: etteḥād-e bozorg-e mellī) was a secular electoral alliance contesting in the 1979 Iranian Constitutional Convention election. The candidates listed by this coalition mostly included communists and nationalists.

For other uses, see Grand National Alliance.
Grand National Alliance
FoundedJuly 1979
Assembly for the Final Review of the Constitution
2 / 73

Parties in coalition

The groups named in the coalition's declaration of existence, were:

  • Revolutionary Organization (sāzmān-e enqelābī) and its youth wing the Revolutionary Youth Organization (sāzmān-e javānān-e enqelābī), a Maoist group split from the Tudeh Party of Iran which was later merged into the Laborers' Party of Iran
  • Iranian Women's Society (jamʿiyat-e zanān-e Īrān)
  • Justice Society (jamʿiyat-e edālat)
  • Confederation of Iranian Students (konfederāsīūn-e jahānī-e moḥaṣṣelīn wa dānešjūyān-e īrānī)
  • The Flag of Sattar Khan (səttar xan bayrağı), an Azeri-language publication which later became aligned with the Laborers' Party of Iran
  • United Campaign for Establishment of the Working Class Party (etteḥād-e mobāraza dar rāh-e ījād-e hezb-e ṭabaqa-ye kārgar), later merged into the Laborers' Party of Iran

Candidates

The candidates endorsed by the coalition for Tehran Province, were:

Constituency Candidate endorsed Group Votes  % Rank Result
Tehran Mahmoud Taleghani FMI[lower-alpha 1] 2,016,801 79.86 1st Won
Abolhassan Banisadr — 1,763,126 69.82 2dnd Won
Habibollah Peyman MMM[lower-alpha 1] 164,644 6.52 15th Defeated
Hassan Nazih FMI[lower-alpha 1] 44,765 1.77 30th Defeated
Lotfollah Meisami PMM[lower-alpha 1] 11,274 0.45 41st Defeated
Parvaneh Forouhar NPI[lower-alpha 1] 8,110 0.32 43rd Defeated
Ali Sadeghi RO 3,473 0.14 47th Defeated
Majid Zarbakhsh UCEWCP 2,719 0.11 50th Defeated
Farideh Garman WS 2,685 0.11 51st Defeated
Hadi Soudbakhsh JS 990 0.04 66th Defeated
  1. The party itself was not part of this coalition
Source: "Condition of Parties" (PDF), Ettela'at, no. 15919, p. 10, 1 August 1979

Of the ten candidates, only two won the election who were also listed by the Coalition of Islamic Parties. Four belonged to the coalition partners, who were all defeated. They included communists Ali Sadeghi, Majid Zarbakhsh, Farideh Garman and Hadi Soudbakhsh.

Farideh Garman was an architect who had just returned to Iran after settling for 14 years in Italy.[1]

Majid Zarbakhsh (born 1940 in Abadan, Iran) was a former student leader who had arrived in the West Germany to study and was involved in anti-Shah protests with German students associated with the New Left.[2] In August 1969, as a secretary of the Confederation of Iranian Students (CISNU) he went to Jordan and participated in the congress of the General Union of Palestinian Students, before visiting Ruhollah Khomeini in Najaf to ensure him that CISNU was both anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist. He also agreed to consider publishing more onn Islamic aspects of opposition to Shah in that meeting.[3] He was, along with Bahman Nirumand and Mehdi Khanbaba-Tehran, part of the triumvirate of the 'Cadres of the Revolutionary Organization', an organization split from the 'Revolutionary Organization of the Tudeh Party' which was itself an offshoot of the Tudeh Party of Iran.[4]

The provincial candidates who were supported at least by one of the coalition partners were:

Constituency Candidate endorsed Group Votes  % Rank Result
Tehran Khalil Haghighat JS 131 0.01 90th Defeated
Fars Iraj Kashkouli RO 5,455 0.89 13th Defeated
Gilan Hossein Hosseinkhani-Moghadam RO Did not run
Masoumeh Zamiri WS 668 0.19 16th Defeated
Khuzestan Ali Saberi RO 6,402 0.37 14th Defeated
Isfahan Asghar Tofangsazi JS 1,815 0.19 20th Defeated
Kermanshahan Khadijeh Soleimani WS 574 0.25 15th Defeated
East Azerbaijan Bagher Mortazavi Khosrowshahi JS 2,652 0.29 22nd Defeated

See also

References
  1. Ghamari-Tabrizi, Behrooz (2016), Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment, University of Minnesota Press, p. 144, ISBN 9781452950563
  2. Davis, Belinda (2010), "A Whole World Opening Up", Changing the World, Changing Oneself: Political Protest and Collective Identities in West Germany and the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s, Berghahn Books, pp. 264–265, ISBN 9781845458089
  3. Alavi, Seyed Ali (2019), Iran and Palestine: Past, Present, Future, Routledge, p. 19, ISBN 9781000022919
  4. Rahnema, Ali (2021), Call to Arms: Iran's Marxist Revolutionaries: Formation and Evolution of the Fada'is, 1964–1976, Oneworld Publications, ISBN 9781786079862
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