The early campaigning underscores the divisive and decisive nature of the election, writes BORZOU DARAGAHIin Tehran
THE COMPETITION for the Iranian presidency has begun in unusual haste, with the candidates trading sharp barbs four months ahead of a crucial election that hinges on the state of the economy and will probably influence the Islamic Republic’s relations with the international community.
Former president Mohammad Khatami, a relative liberal who announced his candidacy this month, has come out swinging against incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Khatami has accused the president of damaging Iran’s foreign relations and has launched a campaign swing through the provinces.
Ahmadinejad and his supporters also have started an aggressive campaign, launching media attacks on Khatami and wooing swing voters with promises of “justice shares”, $60 cash giveaways to voters.
Last week Ahmadinejad toured Yazd, Khatami’s hometown, in an effort to challenge the popular cleric. “The people of Yazd welcome Ahmadinejad with unprecedented hospitality,” declared a front-page headline in Iran, a daily that favours the president.
The burst of activity is a break from the past: Iran’s campaigns typically heat up a month or two or even a few weeks before election day. Political posters are often not allowed until a week before the vote.
The early campaigning underscores the divisive and decisive nature of the presidential election, which may determine whether and how Iran and the international community achieve some kind of understanding on a range of issues, including Iran’s controversial nuclear programme.
Iran’s political system combines elements of a democratic republic and a theocracy. Supreme leader Ali Khamenei oversees critical matters of state, including international relations, but must contend with a dynamic political system and numerous centres of power, including think tanks, religious charities and the military. Candidates for public office must demonstrate fealty to the Islamic system but compete ferociously against each other.
The political establishment is grouped into about half a dozen factions that include liberals such as Khatami who call themselves reformists, conservatives who call themselves “principlists” and groups in between switching partners in a dance of shifting alliances.
Turnout will be a huge factor. Educated city dwellers supportive of Khatami tend to stay away from the polls more than the poorer Ahmadinejad supporters in the countryside.
Lower-middle class urbanites will also be a decisive constituency that could swing for either camp. Ahmadinejad wants to win their votes by doling out cash, a move Khamenei might disallow, analysts said. But they also have fond memories of the Khatami years, when the economy was more responsibly run and Iran’s more positive relations with other countries made trade easier.
“They don’t know whom to vote for,” said Ahmad Bakhshayeshi, a political scientist at Tehran’s Azad University. “They look at their wallets, they take a look at the slogans and the popular wave, and then they decide.”
In addition to Ahmadinejad and Khatami, other potential and declared contenders include former parliamentary speaker Mehdi Karroubi, a reformist slightly to the right of Khatami; former chief nuclear negotiator Hassan Rowhani, a relative centrist; and Tehran mayor Mohammed Baqer Qalibaf, a principlist with a flashier armed forces pedigree than Ahmadinejad.
Khatami faces formidable obstacles on his road to the presidency, including a state-controlled media loyal to the principlists and a clerical establishment that is deeply suspicious of his cause.
Members of Iran’s powerful security forces and Khamenei are believed to strongly back Ahmadinejad over Khatami, whose raucous followers challenged the country’s system during his presidency. But most analysts say Khamenei will jettison Ahmadinejad if popular sentiment shifts toward Khatami.
Ahmadinejad’s enemies abroad are joined by a host of domestic rivals, including Qalibaf, who regularly denounces him. Rowhani, who is close to Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president, also has begun to take aim at Ahmadinejad.
Last week Qalibaf noted that the inflation rate, which had dropped to single digits under Khatami’s presidency, had climbed again. Inflation is running at at least 25 per cent.
Rafsanjani has begun to place his formidable political machinery at the disposal of the president’s rivals, including Khatami. Even the right-wing newspaper Jomhouri Eslami took Ahmadinejad to task for turning celebrations marking the 30th anniversary of the revolution into a campaign event.
Khatami’s supporters say he also won’t repeat the mistakes of Rafsanjani, who lost to Ahmadinejad after running what many described as an elitist campaign. Khatami plans to barnstorm the country. A sometimes wordy and inscrutable scholar of philosophy, he has vowed to focus on bread-and-butter concerns rather than make abstract appeals for building democracy and civil society.
He also has indicated that he won’t challenge Iran’s political system or its constitution and leadership, a move meant as much to soothe the fears of suspicious hardliners as to acknowledge the limits of the reforms Khatami once touted.
– ( LA Times-Washington Post)
Sanctions: tougher list proposed
LONDON – France, Germany and Britain are proposing a tough list of additional sanctions to be imposed against Iran over its disputed nuclear programme, the Financial Times has reported.
A confidential document seen by the FT and Italian newspaper Il Riformista lists 34 Iranian entities and 10 individuals believed to be linked to covert nuclear or biological weapons programmes, the paper said.
It quoted some European diplomats as saying the list was meant to provide US president Barack Obama's administration with a "bigger stick" in a carrot- and-stick approach aimed at getting Iran to stop nuclear activity. It quoted others as saying the three European Union powers, known informally as the "EU-3", wanted to encourage a more hardline outcome of Washington's review of its Iran policy, expected to be completed next month.
A European diplomat said the EU-3 were not trying to toughen Mr Obama's approach. "This is no attempt to influence the United States policy review. But it's aimed at strengthening Obama's ability to act," he said.
Mr Obama has said the US is prepared to talk to Tehran, but tougher sanctions are possible if it keeps refusing to stop uranium enrichment. – (Reuters)