Last week, Iran’s parliament, or Majles, gave its vote of confidence to three new cabinet ministers. The relatively moderate Shamseddin Hosseini and Ali Kordan will take up crucial roles as the economy and interior ministers, respectively, while Hamid Behbahani will head the Ministry of Transport. The Financial Times described Hosseini and Kordan as compromise candidates and called their appointment a blow to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his fundamentalist administration.
According to the Iranian constitution, members of the cabinet are nominated by the elected president and approved by the 290-member Majles. The Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is said to hold influence over appointments in the areas of intelligence and security, but the exact nature and extent of the control he exerts is never made clear. Partly because of this ambiguity, Majles approval of government nominees is by no means a given in Iran. When Ahmadinejad was first elected in 2005, the parliament rejected four of his initial choices. Indeed, the president nominated Hosseini and Kordan only after he was forced to drop his earlier, more radical candidates.
The appointments follow the resignations of former economy minister Davoud Danesh Jaafari and former interior minister Mustafa Pour-Mohammadi earlier this year because of rows with the president over high inflation. With the presidential election looming in 2009, Ahmadinejad has been seeking to deliver on the populist economic policies that he had promised in 2005 and improve conditions for Iran’s poor. As part of that effort, he has put pressure on Iran’s central bank to cut lending rates. This month, he gave the bank a one-month deadline to offer improved rates on loans for short-term employment projects. The bank, however, has resisted the president’s demands, arguing that such policies are fuelling record liquidity growth.
Inflation in Iran now stands at more than 26 percent, having risen from around 11 percent in 2005. Economists and critics of Ahmadinejad blame the increase on the government’s profligate spending of windfall revenues from oil exports. Rising prices are a major source of discontent for Iranians, and over the past year criticism of the president’s policies has intensified within the country.
Moderate conservatives welcome the arrival of Hosseini, who is unlikely to support many of the expansionist policies that the government views as critical to the fulfillment of its election promises. Kordan’s appointment to the Ministry of the Interior, where he will oversee elections, is also welcomed by moderates, many of whom fear that next year’s election might feature a repeat of the candidate disqualifications, noted in this blog, that disrupted parliamentary polls earlier in the year. The two new appointments can therefore be seen as a strategic retreat on the part of the president from his hard-line policies, perhaps in an attempt to gain the support of Iran’s moderate conservatives in the forthcoming presidential election.
While the economy is likely to be a crucial issue in the presidential election, political analysts say Ahmadinejad’s survival in office will depend on his ability to retain the support of the ruling establishment, namely Ayatollah Khamenei. During his speech to the Majles in favor of his nominations, the president departed from standard practice by making explicit reference to Khamenei’s support for Kordan. The Supreme Leader, who traditionally remains aloof from the base machinery of politics, made no comment regarding this public use of his name for blatantly political purposes, but an unofficial spokesman later clarified that while Khamenei had said he did not oppose the nomination, he did not offer his positive endorsement. Nevertheless, observers outside Iran speculated that members of the Majles, some of whom had fiercely criticized Kordan and accused him of lying about his credentials, were swayed by the fear of defying the Supreme Leader.
The episode illustrates the opacity of Ayatollah Khamenei’s involvement in the appointment process, and of his relationship with the elected bodies in general. While this lack of clarity allows room for debate and competition in what might otherwise become a simple autocratic system, it is also open to exploitation by leaders like Ahmadinejad. Though failing on the economic front and besieged by rivals, he was apparently able to muzzle his critics and avoid another defeat by invoking the support of the Supreme Leader, to whom even elected officials owe their ultimate political allegiance.
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