The election of the hardline mayor of Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, as Iran’s new president has provoked shock and consternation. It seems to signal the death of reform in Iran, and it raises troubling questions about Iran’s relations with the rest of the world.
Most experts had expected Ahmadi-Nejad’s more pragmatic challenger, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, to win. Indeed many Western diplomats had been counting on a Rafsanjani victory. It was widely thought that Rafsanjani would prove more successful than the outgoing president, Mohammed Khatami, in standing up to the well-entrenched religious conservatives – and might even be able to increase the power of the president at the expense of that of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.
The hope had been that, as a veteran politician, Rafsanjani was better placed than any of the other candidates to handle the crucial and vexed question of Iran’s nuclear programme. Moreover he had suggested in a series of interviews with the Western media that he was the man to resolve Iran’s problems with the United States.
Some of these hopes may have been misplaced; nevertheless they were widely shared – and the victory of the little-known Ahmadi-Nejad has accordingly come as a rude shock.
How should we explain his success? Whereas Rafsanjani is seen as corrupt and excessively wealthy, the mayor of Tehran presented himself as a simple, honest, working-class “man of the people” – committed to social justice, the creation of jobs and the elimination of corruption. Moreover he clearly had the backing of the conservative wing of the religious establishment – and of the two powerful paramilitary bodies, the Basij and the Revolutionary Guards, both of which have well-disciplined networks of supporters.
Ahmadi-Nejad succeeded in mobilising those who believe Iran’s revolution has lost its way. He wants to revive the idealistic principles of justice and equality on which Khomeini’s Islamic revolution was originally founded. Some have referred to this as a kind of “Islamic socialism”. In addition, he appears suspicious of the West, resistant to the kind of flexibility and pragmatism in foreign relations with which Rafsanjani has sought to associate himself.
The question is whether the new president is in a position to carry out these aims in anything more than a symbolic way. Clearly, he has the power to create a new government more closely fashioned in his own image. There is already an expectation that he will purge the oil ministry, whose top officials came out openly in support of his rival, Rafsanjani. If so, this will do nothing to reassure Iran’s trading partners.
However, it should be remembered that Iran has a collective leadership. The president has some power, but he is by no means the chief decision-maker – as Ahmadi-Nejad’s predecessor, the would-be reformist Mohammed Khatami, discovered to his cost. There is a complex and opaque system of collective decision-making, involving a variety of individuals and bodies – and when the system is unable to reach a decision, the final arbiter is Ayatollah Khamenei.
Moreover Ahmadi-Nejad is a novice in international affairs, and so will be dependent on foreign-policy advisers. All this suggests that a dramatic change in foreign policy – especially on the all-important nuclear issue – is unlikely. The election of a hardline conservative is unwelcome news, but it is premature to conclude that he can simply turn back the clock.
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