Word: larijani
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...system actually allows the Supreme Leader to present different faces to the world. While he has strongly backed Ahmadinejad, for example, Khamenei also for a time designated one of the president's key pragmatist critics, Ali Larijani, as the point man in negotiations with the West over Iran's nuclear program...
...election battle in June, and there have been questions over whether his health will allow him to run for a second term. If he does, he's likely to face a close fight from a united front of pragmatic conservatives, like current parliamentary speaker and former nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani and former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and reformists like former President Mohammed Khatami. And just as it was the economy that got Ahmadinejad elected in 2005 on a populist chicken-in-every-pot platform, so could the failing economy prove his undoing. Many of Iran's glaring economic deficiencies...
...hard-line incumbent looks vulnerable because of domestic woes, including high inflation and unemployment, and an international environment in which Iran's relations with the West are at their most strained since the 1979 revolution. Qalibaf won't be the only challenger - others may include Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani, a former national security chief, and ex-Speaker Gholam-Ali Haddad Adel - but Qalibaf, a conservative, came in a respectable fourth in the 2005 presidential election, which makes many think he has the best chance to unseat Ahmadinejad...
...presidential candidate. Among those contenders may be the popular mayor of Tehran, Mohammed-Baqer Qalibaf, who has criticized Ahmadinejad's belligerent foreign policy statements and mishandling of the Iranian economy. Ahmadinejad seems to recognize the shifting winds; he let it be known that he, too, preferred his bitter rival Larijani over Haddad-Adel in the speaker contest...
...Because Larijani's political comback certainly had the blessing of Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei - who wields executive power in Iran - an analyst in Tehran told TIME it signals that Khamenei, the ultimate arbiter in Iranian politics, may be prepared to sanction challenges to Ahmadinejad's reelection next year. Whether or not Larijani becomes a presidential candidate, he is likely to use his high-profile post as parliamentary speaker to question Ahmadinejad's policies and offer alternatives. That, along with Khamenei's ambivalence about Ahmadinejad's political future, could weaken the incumbent's authority and prepare the ground...