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IRAN: Is the World Getting Ahmadinejadised?

Analysis by Kimia Sanati

TEHRAN, Nov 29 2006 (IPS) - "The world is becoming rapidly Ahmadinejadised, if I&#39m allowed to make a joke," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told journalists last week. Given his habit of grabbing world headlines, such as with his "letter to the American people" released at the United Nations on Wednesday, that may not be an empty boast.

The 50-year-old former mayor of Tehran may have gained much popularity in the Islamic world for his defiance of the great powers, the United States foremost, since assuming office on Aug. 6, 2005. But at home it is another story.

More than 90 percent of participants in a recent Internet poll conducted by the Aftab news agency and commissioned by an institute affiliated with Iran&#39s Expediency Council said his popularity had diminished or greatly diminished over the last 16 months. Only eight percent of respondents believed his popularity was the same, more or much more than before.

Ahmadinejad is known internationally for his attacks on the exclusive right of veto given to the permanent members of the U.N. Security Council that prevents other countries from gaining nuclear technology, as well as his remarks on the holocaust, threats against Israel and his support for Lebanese Hizbollah. But he has also stirred up controversy domestically.

A top student at Tehran&#39s Science and Technology University, he was prominent among the radical Islamist students in the early years after the Islamic Revolution of 1978. Photos showing a man resembling a young Ahmadinejad alongside one of the U.S. hostages, when the U.S. embassy in Tehran was taken over by radical students in 1979, emerged after he took office. A similar photo has recently been discovered in Russia.

However, reformist critics, like Said Hajjarian and Mohsen Mirdamadi, say that at that time, Ahmadinejad believed communism to be a bigger danger and that he offered to seize the Russian embassy instead. They say he was not among those present for the siege.

In later years, he was appointed governor of two small towns in Kurdistan province, served with the Revolutionary Guards in war fronts with Iraq, and became governor general of the northwestern province of Ardabil.

The reformist Mohammad Khatami&#39s presidency in 1997 saw Ahmadinejad return to university as a lecturer. He stayed there until 2003 when he was elected mayor of Tehran by a hardline city council that had taken over from a reformist council by only 12 percent of the vote.

As mayor, Ahmadinejad soon began to give greater religious direction to the activities of municipal cultural centres, which hardliners believed had become dens of immorality by encouraging young girls and boys to mix, and by staging art performances and exhibitions they considered degenerate and immoral.

The municipality, under Ahmadinejad, offered marriage loans to young couples and often distributed food to the poor. Ahmadinejad, who lived and still lives a very simple life, speaks the language of ordinary people and calls himself a "servant of the people", sometimes partaking of community meals with municipal workers and street sweepers in Tehran.

As mayor, he proposed to bury the bodies of those martyred in the war with Iraq in the squares of the capital. Critics, including then Parliament speaker Mehdi Karrubi, himself a well-recognised cleric and father of a fallen soldier, accused him of wanting to turn the city into a graveyard. The plan was abandoned despite strong support from the hardliners.

The circumstances leading to Ahmadinejad&#39s winning the presidency, with 62 percent of the vote, remain a mystery. Ahmadinejad, it seems, became popular among ordinary people during the last three weeks leading up to the elections.

Election slogans promising to place oil money on peoples&#39 dinner tables, to fight corruption and bureaucracy and to make education cheaper were very attractive to the country&#39s lower classes who brought him to power. Many, tired of clerical rule, saw his defence of the poor and the oppressed in stark contrast to the status of his main rival, Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi who had come to be known as a symbol of clerical oligarchy and technocracy.

Rivals, from both the reformist and the hardline camps, alleged irregularities and vote-rigging in the first round of the elections. His opponent in the second round, Akbar Hashemi, complained of a systematic character assassination campaign led by the militia arm of the Revolutionary Guards, which Ahmadinejad once served.

The former mayor of Tehran claims he spent very little money on his campaign and that everything was done voluntarily by his supporters. After taking office, however, allegations of municipality money spent for unspecified purposes during his tenure emerged. There have been demands by the hardline parliament to investigate the misappropriation of municipality money.

The hardline parliament&#39s refusal to give a complete vote of confidence to Ahmadinejad&#39s cabinet, of which four ministers were turned down after much debate, was unprecedented. Even the reformist Mohammad Khatami had managed to get total approval for his cabinet from a parliament opposed to reforms.

Core Ahmadinejad supporters came from the Revolutionary Guards, the municipality and theological seminaries of Qom, the religious heart of Iran. Many of them were offered high administrative positions later. His mentor, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, himself a very controversial hardline senior cleric in Qom and a sworn enemy of reformists, was the only high-ranking cleric to support his presidency in 2005.

Soon after taking office, Ahmadinejad addressed the U.N. General Assembly in New York. Reporting his achievements there to one of the country&#39s most prominent clerics, he claimed he had been surrounded by a halo of light when he was delivering his speech, implying divine support for his person.

A film taken of the meeting soon made the rounds and he came to be known as "Mr. Halo of Light". Iran&#39s leading reformist newspaper, Shargh, was banned a few months ago when it ran a cartoon depicting a donkey with a halo around its head, braying at a puzzled horse on a chessboard.

Many of his critics see the claim of divine support, repeated on other occasions as well, and some of the president&#39s other statements about himself, such as having launched a "new revolution" or the world becoming "Ahmadinejadised" as signs of a narcissistic personality. The Iranian president seems to believe he has a divine mission to revive Islam and save the world.

Ahmadinejad is also said to be a man of little tolerance for opposition. Recently, just a few months short of a parliamentary debate for next year&#39s budget, he forced vice-president Rahbar, head of the Management and Planning Organisation, to resign, allegedly for having opposed changes in the organisation he had ordered.

Ahmadinejad&#39s battle with private banks, the Parsian Bank in particular, has been considered by others as taking a personal grudge against the bank&#39s Chief Executive too far.

While mayor, Ahmadinejad was not invited to cabinet meetings of reformist president Mohammad Khatami. After he became president, it was Ahmadinejad&#39s turn to refuse to invite Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, his hardline rival in the presidential elections who had been elected as mayor, to cabinet meetings.

Supporters of the two men are leading a fierce battle against each other these days. If the hardline camp fails to produce a single slate of candidates, it is likely that their reformist rivals will win. The new mayor is determined to keep his post, however, and Ahmadinejad allegedly refuses to enter a coalition with the rest of the hardline and conservative camp if Ghalibaf, now inclined towards moderate reformists, remains mayor.