The funeral of a senior Iranian cleric on Tuesday triggered the country’s largest anti-government demonstration in years. Tens of thousands of Iranians marched against the Iranian leadership, chanted anti-regime slogans, and rallied in support of jailed opposition members:

The protesters chanted slogans against the government and the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, calling for the “death to the dictator.” Among other slogans, they chanted “The political prisoners must freed” and “Mousavi and Karroubi must be freed,” referring to the leaders of the reformist green movement who are under house arrest in Tehran.

Jalal Al-Din Taheri, who died on Sunday, had distanced himself from Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in recent years. At one point the dissident cleric described the supreme leader as being worse than Pharaoh. The protests – video embedded below – come just ten days before Iran’s presidential election.

The June 14 presidential election ballot was purged by Iran’s Guardian Council and limited to eight hardliners. Among them are two, Mohsen Rezai and Ali Akbar Velayati, who have been linked to the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, Argentina that killed 85 people and injured hundreds.

Some foreign policy analysts had, in recent months, suggested that the regime might moderate in the aftermath of the election. Their analysis was used to urge the U.S. and the West to avoid pressuring Tehran, and in fact some critics had suggested that it was crafted for those purposes.

The final composition of the ballot, coupled with a recent speech by Khamenei in which he forbade the eventual winner from compromising with the West, aligns poorly with those theories.

[Photo: bbc.co.uk]