Word: centralization
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...days before the Iranian election, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad held a big rally at the Mosallah Mosque - said to be the world's largest, if it is ever completed - in central Tehran. It was not very well organized. About 20,000 supporters of the President were inside the building, being entertained by a series of TV stars, athletes and religious singers. Many thousands more swirled outside. Inside, a TV host led the crowd in chanting "Death to Israel." "Squeeze your teeth and yell from the bottom of your heart," he implored. Later, the host said he had once asked Iran...
...walked at first, then found a cab. But central Tehran had become an implacable traffic jam - and a gridlocked political debate. The Ahmadinejad supporters, many on motor scooters, skittered through the lines of automobiles, most of which were decked out with signs supporting the moderate challenger Mir-Hossein Mousavi. There was good-natured banter between the two groups. "Chist, chist, chist," the Ahmadinejad supporters chanted, referring to Mousavi's awkward, constant use of that word - Farsi for "y'know" - during his debate with Ahmadinejad. The Mousavi supporters chanted, "Ahmadi - bye, bye." After about an hour, our cabdriver gave...
...cheese-buying public - the working class, the elderly, the women in chadors - seemed to adore Ahmadinejad. One of the favorite slogans of his supporters was "Ahmadinejad is love." On election day, Nahid and I went to Ahmadinejad's childhood neighborhood, Nazi Abad, and interviewed voters. The lines at the central mosque were every bit as long as they were at the voting stations in sophisticated north Tehran. There was a smattering of Mousavi supporters, but the Ahmadinejad worship was palpable. He was kind to the families of martyrs, one man said, which was true - Ahmadinejad had lavished attention...
...election controversy provided considerable new insight into the cleric believed to hold absolute power, Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. Everyone expected voting irregularities, she said, but not "this degree of blatant, in-your-face fraud." That Khamenei almost instantly certified the victory of his candidate, incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dashed a central assumption about his regime: that its survival and social stability are intertwined with the legitimacy of Iran's democratic institutions. "He was willing to jettison the democratic institutions and effectively cede whatever remaining legitimacy there was in a popular vote in favor of maintaining total control," Maloney said...
Khamenei's abrupt dismissal of reform candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi's supporters also suggests that he has lost touch with a central principle of the Islamic revolution, says Gary Sick, Jimmy Carter's top White House adviser on Iran during that period. Mousavi's supporters were mobilized by feelings of injustice, "that they've been dealt with contempt by their leaders," says Sick. "That sense of being wronged and betrayed is a driving feature in Iran," as powerful as the widespread anger over false arrest and torture by the Shah's secret police...