Four candidates confirmed for Iran vote

TEHRAN, May 20 (UPI) -- Iranian elections officials Wednesday confirmed two Principlist and two Reformist candidates are eligible f or the June 12 presidential election.

Though candidates have issued statements and interviews for the past few weeks, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reports that the official campaign season begins on Wednesday and runs to June 11, 24 hours before the election.

Incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is expected to tout the legacy of his presidential term during the campaign, though on Wednesday he heralded the launch of a solid-fuel surface-to-surface missile as a possible answer to top-level meetings in Washington with Israeli officials. He is running on the Principlist ticket.

Mohsen Rezaei, a former commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, is challenging Ahmadinejad on the Principlist ticket, using economic issues and dialogue with the United States as his campaign platform.

Former Prime Minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi is running as a Reformist, hoping to gain voter confidence from his experiences as premier during the Iran-Iraq war.

Rounding out the Reformist ticket is Mehdi Karroubi, a former parliamentary speaker and stark critic of Ahmadinejad. Karroubi also calls for dialogue with the United States, but called on Washington to back its latest conciliatory messages with concrete action. Karroubi faced early pressure from the Reformist camp to back out of the race.

While the international arena focuses its ire at Iranian foreign policy initiatives, domestic criticisms are bent toward complaints over failed economic strategies and populist rhetoric in the Ahmadinejad administration.