Iran+Presidential+Election***article


 * Iran's presidential election **

**Back to the future?**  Feb 12th 2009 | CAIRO From The Economist print edition

**A belligerent president is at last being challenged by a pragmatic reformist** MAHMOUD AHMADINEJAD, Iran’s president, faces a disgruntled people, an election in June, and now a strong new challenger for his job. This week Muhammad Khatami, a jovial, 65-year-old reformist cleric, who is more softly spoken and gentler-looking than the incumbent, finally decided to throw his turban into the ring. He previously served two terms as president, from 1997 to 2005. At the time, Mr Khatami’s double electoral triumph was seen as a rebuke to the harder ideologues who had dominated revolutionary Iran’s hybrid theo-democracy. His fractious reformists, however, proved no match for the conservatives entrenched in the power structure. Not only did they block most reforms. They also succeeded in pinning blame for their failure on the reformists themselves and in alienating enough voters to pave the way for Mr Ahmadinejad’s ascent. Mr Khatami’s return to the fray raises the hopes of the many Iranians who have chafed under Mr Ahmadinejad’s rule. His spendthrift public-works programmes, fuelled by high oil prices and designed to impress the poor, have instead sparked high inflation that has eroded middle-class purchasing power. A harsh clampdown on dissent, combined with tightened rules for “Islamic” behaviour and the belligerent language that has provoked international hostility, have stoked grim memories for many of the darker days immediately after the Islamic revolution of 1979, a time of economic hardship, diplomatic isolation and drastically reduced personal freedom. Mr Ahmadinejad’s populism still wins admirers and gets the backing of the hawkish security apparatus and the courts. But simmering public discontent and the rising anxiety that has followed the oil-price collapse now worry even his fellow conservatives, to the point where it is not clear whether the president will end up as their favoured candidate in June. Other contenders, such as Ali Larijani, the parliament’s speaker, could get the crucial blessing of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has so far favoured Mr Ahmadinejad’s conservatism but has been known to make pragmatic concessions to public opinion in the name of “preserving the revolution”. The recent softening of Mr Ahmadinejad’s tone regarding Iran’s biggest foreign-policy challenge, relations with America, may be an opening gambit in the looming election campaign as much as it is a simple response to early overtures from President Barack Obama. “The Iranian nation is ready for talks, but in a fair atmosphere with mutual respect,” Mr Ahmadinejad told the crowd in Tehran’s Freedom Square during celebrations for the Islamic revolution’s 30th anniversary, on February 10th. In the same speech, he proclaimed Iran a superpower, trumpeting its development of nuclear and rocket technology as symbols of national virility. Mr Ahmadinejad, it seems, is out to prove that his punchy chauvinism, rather than Mr Khatami’s quiet diplomacy, will win the Islamic Republic its rightful place in the sun.