Iran's embattled education minister has resigned, the latest change to the cabinet of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ahead of elections next year, officials said on Sunday. "Mahmoud Farshidi has tendered his resignation to the president as minister of education," top ministry adviser Mirvali Moussavi was quoted as saying by state television.
An official in the office of the presidency, who asked not to be named, told AFP that Ahmadinejad had accepted the resignation. "By tomorrow, at the latest, a decree will be issued for his replacement," the source said. The official IRNA news agency added that Ali Reza Ali Ahmadi, currently head of the Iranian open university, was the likely successor.
Ahmadinejad has in recent months fired the oil and industry ministers and also replaced the head of the central bank, prompting his opponents to accuse him of leaving decision-making to a close coterie of allies. The changes come ahead of parliamentary elections due on March 14, when moderates loyal to former presidents Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mohammad Khatami will try to challenge the hard-liners close to the president.
The political temperature in Iran has risen considerably in past weeks, with both sides exchanging unusually explicit verbal blows over the government's performance. Underlining the pre-electoral tensions, the hard-line daily Kayhan launched a blistering attack on Sunday on Iranian reformists, accusing them of supporting Israel, the country's arch regional foe.
"Why does the reform front support Israel and wild, killer Zionists so openly?" asked the editorial in the mouthpiece of the clerical establishment, signed by its editor Hossein Shariatmadari.
He accused reformists of seeking "power at any price, even hostility to their own people." "The so-called advocates for reform have almost always taken the side of Israel in the conflict between the oppressed people of Palestine and the blood-spilling, savage Zionists." But the education minister had also been plagued by a series of specific problems.
In May dozens of MPs attempted to impeach Farshidi for failing to achieve the country's education objectives, but the embattled minister survived after Ahmadinejad gave a speech in his defence.