Profile: Ghazizadeh Hashemi, Ex-Lawmaker, Head of Martyrs’ Foundation

By Press TV Website Staff

Iran’s 12-member election supervisory body, the Constitutional Council, has approved six candidates to participate in the upcoming presidential election scheduled for June 28.

Among those approved is Seyyed Amir-Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi, a former parliamentarian who now heads the organization that oversees the welfare of the families of veterans and martyrs.

Iran is set to hold a snap presidential election on June 28, one year earlier than expected, following the martyrdom of President Ebrahim Raeisi in a tragic helicopter crash in northwestern Iran on May 19.

The candidates approved by the Islamic Republic’s top vetting body will have two weeks for campaigning and presidential debates before the polling takes place.

Hashemi was born in 1971 in Fariman, a city in northeastern Razavi Khorasan province. His father, a baker by profession, has two other sons and four daughters.

He was raised in a religious and revolutionary family. His grandfather was a strong opponent of the anti-Islamic policies and practices of the West-backed Pahlavi dynasty regime.

His younger brother, Seyyed Ahsan Ghazizadeh Hashemi, is a politician who represented the constituency of Fariman and Sarakhs in the parliament.

Hashemi is a cousin of Seyyed Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi, a former representative of Fariman and Sarakhs, and Seyyed Hassan Ghazizadeh Hashemi, who served as the health minister in Hassan Rouhani's government.

As a teenager, he actively participated in the last years of the Iraq-Iran war and was wounded in the leg, requiring surgery.

After returning from the war, he studied medicine at Mashhad University of Medical Sciences and graduated as an ENT specialist. He got married in 1997 and has a son and a daughter.

Hashemi was chosen as the vice president of the Khorasan Veterans Foundation in 2002 and became a member of the board of trustees of Mashhad University of Medical Sciences.

He worked as an associate professor at Shahid Beheshti University of Medical Sciences and was the president of Semnan University of Medical Sciences before becoming a member of parliament.

Hashemi entered the 8th parliament in 2008 as a representative of Mashhad and Kalat constituency and also participated in the 9th, 10th, and 11th legislatures until 2021.

He is a member of the Central Council of the Front of Islamic Revolution Stability and served as the party spokesperson from 2013 to 2014. From 2020 to 2021, he served as the deputy spokesperson of the parliament.

In 2021, he was appointed vice president of Iran and head of the Foundation of Martyrs and Veterans Affairs, a government body that looks after the welfare of veterans and families of martyrs.

In the same year, he participated in the presidential election and, with slightly more than a million votes, finished fourth among the candidates before backing the candidacy of Ebrahim Raeisi.

On June 3, the last day of registration, Hashemi filed his nomination again and at a press conference spoke about his political vision for the country.

He praised President Raeisi’s perseverance and dedicated work to solve people's problems, adding that the Iranian people still face problems and challenges that must be addressed.

Hashemi promised to remove the barriers between the government and the people, emphasizing the need for a significant number of elite youth to enter the country's administrative services to revolutionize mechanisms and transform the model.

He considers himself a rival to the century-old state-oriented bureaucracy and closed management circles that, according to him, ignore the country's capacities.

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