Iran’s hard-line ex-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has filed to run in the June 28 presidential election, which is being held following the sudden death of Ibrahim Raishi in a helicopter crash, Iranian state television reported today.

But he may be blocked by the Constitutional Guards Council (a body of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei), which must approve candidates for election.

Ahmadinejad was the president of Iran from 2005 to 2013.

In the 2017 elections, the Council did not allow him to run, after the previous year Khamenei had warned him that his candidacy “is not in his own interest and that of the country.”

The two men have been at loggerheads since Ahmadinejad called for checks on Khamenei’s absolute power. In fact, in 2018 he wrote him a letter in which he asked for “free” elections to be held.

Khamenei had supported Ahmadinejad when, after his re-election in 2009, a violent wave of protests erupted, during which dozens of people were killed and hundreds arrested before it was violently suppressed.