Word: ahmadinejad
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Dates: during 2005-2005
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Hard-liner is not a nice word, even for hard-liners. So, immediately after his stunning landslide last week, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared that as Iran's new President, he would not be shutting Iran off from the rest of the world or curtailing the Internet or taking the country back to the 9th century. His Iran, said the erstwhile mayor of Tehran, would be modern and strong (meaning nuclear powered) and rich, with prosperity to be shared among all classes, not just the élite. Still, the streets of Tehran's better-off northern districts were like a ghost town...
...unassuming Ahmadinejad, 48, defeated the wily political veteran Ayatullah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, 70, who ran on a pragmatic platform that promised accommodation with the West. But Rafsanjani could not consolidate support from the country's liberal and progressive voters who were wary of his family's largely unexplained wealth and unhappy about the corruption that grew under his watch as President from 1989 to 1997. So while Iran's economically disadvantaged classes, Islamic militias and web of religious social-action groups provided Ahmadinejad with 62% of the votes, Rafsanjani could muster only 36% in a country almost evenly split...
...while theoretically above politics, runs Iranian foreign and nuclear policy from behind closed doors), the presidency has been a strategic bully pulpit for those with ideas different from the theocracy. Now with Rafsanjani humiliated at the polls and reformists crying in the wilderness, Khamenei has an acolyte as President. Ahmadinejad, says a political scientist based in Tehran, will effectively function as Khamenei's "executive secretary." The opposition in Iran grumbles that Khamenei's hand--and funds--may have given the modest Ahmadinejad's campaign a huge and unfair boost. The former mayor's supporters say otherwise. Says one: "We believe...
...field of seven candidates, Ahmadinejad won about 19% of the popular vote, nowhere near the more than 50% needed to become President outright. But the favorite, the pragmatic Ayatullah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, 70, won only 21%, hence this Friday's runoff vote between the two. The reformers on last week's ballot, supporters of the policies of outgoing President Mohammed Khatami, were badly trounced and now see in Ahmadinejad's smiling face a stealth campaign by Iran's conservative ruling ayatullahs to take the presidency, denying it even to Rafsanjani, who has his fair share of hard-line credentials...
...runoff campaign began online and in the media as soon as the official results were established, with reformists throwing in their lot for Rafsanjani and conservatives supporting Ahmadinejad. Even though George W. Bush has dismissed Iran's elections as undemocratic, the country's liberalizing and conservative forces know that victory depends on a strategy the U.S. President can appreciate: turning out their base in a country split down the middle by ideology. --By Nahid Siamdoust