With Iran’s June 12 presidential election fast approaching, the factional dynamics in the political system are shifting furiously and causing notable political strife. Although the election is effectively a referendum on the incumbent, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and his neoconservative Islamism characterized by a bellicose anti-western foreign policy and a financially crippling domestic policy, opposition groups – both liberal and conservative – are highly fractured, and the battle lines ever-evolving.
Ahmadinejad’s principle competitors for the presidency are Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a reformist who seeks to ease pressures on the media and engage abroad while maintaining the system’s basic structure. He was the last prime minister of Iran between 1981 and 1989 and was popular during his tenure. Mehdi Karroubi, a politician and cleric and the other “reformist” in the race, is more moderate and pragmatic regarding domestic reform in Iran and changing its foreign policy; he served as the speaker of the Majlis (the Iranian parliament) for a total of seven years over two terms.
Ahmadinejad has been fiercely attacked on all sides for his militarization of Iranian politics. The President’s base of support is firmly embedded in the military and paramilitary elements and extremist clerics of the Haqqani school – an archconservative Shiite sect that unequivocally adheres to the notion of a divine state and leaves no room for popular sovereignty. The most important and influential of these clerics is Mohammad-Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, the spiritual adviser to Ahmadinejad and a member of the Assembly of Experts, the body charged with electing the Supreme Leader. This makeshift radical alliance had been pushed to the margins of the Iranian power structure before Ahmadinejad’s rise, and Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s level of commitment to their continued preservation in power has always been extremely vague to outsiders. Furthermore, although in the last four years Ahmadinejad has managed to promote his allies to positions of power, with Ahmad Jannati, another founding member of the Haqqani school, serving as the chairman of the powerful Guardian Council, three other key institutions remain outside the incumbent’s control. These are the Assembly of Experts, the Expediency Discernment Council, which is an advisory body to Ayatollah Khamenei helping to resolve issues with parliament, and the Majlis.
Ahmadinejad’s role in increasing the influence of the army and extremist clerics in everyday life has earned him powerful enemies who would be classified as conservative by western standards, but juxtaposed to the current administration appear rather more moderate. One of these is Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former two-term president and current chairman of both the Assembly of Experts and the Expediency Discernment Council. Though the dynamic has changed somewhat, the principle issue that has separated Ahmadinejad from the more pragmatic conservatives – let alone the reformists – is relations with the US. Whereas the former and his ilk are willing to accept great sacrifices in their striving for a “pure” Islamic republic, the latter are less confrontational and more actively seek engagement. This debate takes place in the wider context of evaluating Iran’s position in the world and is manifested at every level of domestic politics, especially during election season. Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment explains that Ahmadinejad is attempting to balance his clerical backers, who believe that one of the “fundamental pillars of the revolution, and one of the central identities of the Islamic republic, to retain an adversarial relationship with the United States.” However, Iran also has a very young population, much of which wants to normalize relations with the western world and sees the current antagonism as crippling Iran economically and isolating it politically, socially, and culturally. Walking the line between the ire of both groups is a constant challenge for the president.
Furthermore, Ahmadinejad’s mismanagement of the economy has also cost him support among conservatives. Mohsen Rezai, the former head of the Revolutionary Guards and an ally of the president in the 2005 elections, has recently criticized Ahmadinejad and announced his candidacy for the race. This move crucially splits the Principalists, a major conservative faction, who are far more inclined towards a free market economy than Ahmadinejad and the Haqqani school. As with Rezai, the Principalists fully supported Ahmadinejad in 2005, yet after four years of ever increasing inflation and unemployment, and crude government injections of money to support food subsidies and massive wage boosts, people have clearly realized that Iran’s development policy is lacking in coherence. Furthermore, Rezai has even declared his support for dialogue with the US. Whether this was done out of real conviction, or merely to raise support, or even out of purely economic considerations, the emerging consensus that there is a need to engage with the US can only be seen as a positive step.
Such dissent from Rezai might not be so disconcerting to Ahmadinejad – the former is not seen as a primary contender – had it not been for Ayatollah Khamenei’s recent public disapproval of the incumbent, as a recent New York Times article indicated. Furthermore, during Ahmadinejad’s recent visits to provincial capitals to raise support the state media took the step of specifically not airing coverage of Ahmadinejad’s trip. It is always possible to read too far into such signs, especially with Iran, where western knowledge of the local higher echelon politics is limited at best; however, the series of recent blows he has taken are certainly significant, even if potentially overestimated.
Yet while Ahmadinejad’s group appear to be under pressure to amend their stringent domestic policies, the reformist camp is faring little better. In February, Mohammad Khatami, a former president and candidate until he withdrew from the race in favour of Mousavi, was forced to abandon his advocation of democracy and publicly reaffirm the supremacy of the Islamic system as the foundation of any future state. Furthermore, Ahmadinejad is employing the full powers of the state against Mousavi and Karroubi, including the distribution of checks in poor neighborhoods and the persuasion of generals to endorse him. The greatest shock came in the last week of April, when the elections supervisor at the Ministry of the Interior predicted a clear Ahmadinejad victory. Naturally the state’s more coercive instruments have also been used to attack a wide range of opposition groups, from human rights activists to those pressing for democratization.
Although the 2007 Countries at the Crossroads report affirms that the independence of the judiciary has somewhat improved in recent years, these gains seem to have been put on hold with the elections so close. One example relates to one of the few developments in Iran’s factional battles that is easily observable from abroad: the case of Roxana Saberi, an American-Iranian journalist with US citizenship who was arrested for espionage. Her detention in itself seemed surprising; although Saberi wrote about the moderately taboo issue of the gender segregation in social life, she was careful to not aggravate the authorities with confrontational articles. That Saberi was arrested and her trial rushed through the courts was seen as evidence of the conservatives flexing their muscles to warn both international and domestic opponents ahead of the elections. However, Ahmadinejad’s subsequent call for Saberi’s case to be examined more closely by the judiciary, and her subsequent release, further highlights the factionalism in the conservative bloc, Ahmadinejad’s interest in avoiding choking off the possibility of dialogue with the west, and – perhaps most of all – the degree to which, in the current season, outside observers must largely simply watch and wait.
