Word: reformist
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...maintain the state's status as France's largest employer, providing one of every four jobs. "Raffarin previously flirted with reform, but that's changing with this budget," says political analyst Alain Duhamel. "On areas like decentralization, tax reduction and even modifying the 35-hour week, he is proving reformist. On the issues more likely to provoke explosion?reducing civil servants and public services, for starters?he's looking as unenthusiastic as his predecessors...
Among the few Muslim countries that still condone stoning, Iran uses it most often. Although Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini is said to have discouraged the practice because of the brutal image it gave Islam, conservative judges have inflicted the punishment recently, most likely to embarrass and undermine reformist President Mohammed Khatami. Iran's penal code specifies, "The stoning of an adulterer or adulteress shall be carried out while each is placed in a hole and covered with soil, he up to his waist and she up to a line above her breasts." Court-appointed officials or ordinary citizens then pelt...
There are few things President Mohammad Khatami likes less than confrontation. Even when Iran's hard-line clerical rulers used their executive authority to turn Khatami's reformist presidency into a punching bag, he rolled with the blows, refusing to publicly challenge their systematic obstruction of his agenda. Until now, that is. On Wednesday, Khatami broke with over five years of fruitlessly pursuing conciliation, issuing an unprecedented legal challenge to hard-liners monopoly on state power. Addressing reporters in Tehran, the president announced his plan to submit a bill to parliament - where his reform policies enjoy majority support - seeking...
...timing of Khatami's challenge signals the extent to which tension has mounted in Tehran since President George W. Bush named Iran as part of an "axis of evil." Hardliners have exploited the security threat implied by Bush's rhetoric to further consolidate their hold on power - sentencing reformist legislators to prison time, closing liberal newspapers, and meddling in foreign policy. Bush administration officials have publicly expressed doubt in the ability of Khatami's reform movement to break the grip of hard-line clerics, and the combination of external and domestic pressures may have prompted him to take the initiative...
...throwing down the gauntlet, President Khatami may be signaling that he has lost hope of pursuing his reformist goals via a consensus achieved behind-closed-doors with the conservative religious leadership. It's a high-stakes political gamble that is likely to restore Khatami's standing among ordinary Iranians, and undermine the hard-liners who cling to the ideology of "revolutionary unity" as the pretext for their unpopular policies - and are therefore terrified of being exposed as being at odds with an overwhelmingly popular president...