Election of mayor in Iranian and French legal systems

The decentralized institutions have a considerable place in the realization of the principles of democracy, so that if there are necessary conditions, including their independence from the central government, one can hope to use them sufficiently In order to fulfill democratic criteria, including participation and control. Moreover, their formation without the necessary qualities can be merely a political show. The way of selecting the mayor is one of the issues that has a significant impact on the fulfillment of the necessary criteria in the decentralized institution such as the municipality. Therefore, its conditions of eligibility and the administrative procedure must be precisely determined. This article aims to find out the common and different points in selecting a mayor in the Iranian and French legal systems in order to find out their weaknesses or strengths, which has been done through library studies and descriptive-analytic methods. The result of this study is that the government's Intervention in the selection of mayor in Iranian legal system is far more than France. Regarding the conditions of eligibility of the mayor, the French legal system has chosen the conditions more restricted and concrete, while the situation in Iran is much more detailed and complex. It seems that in France, meritocracy has been pursued in ways such as partyisme and in Iran, through the establishment of multiple conditions for the post of mayor.