Why did Ahmadinejad win?

Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (49): A landslide win

Dr. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (49) swept to a landslide win (62.2 percent of the popular vote) in the run-off presidential election in Iran on June 24, defeating 71-year old former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. He takes over the office of the presidency next month.

Ahmadinejad is a civil engineer with a Ph.D degree (1986).

Media reports indicate that Rafsanjani could not believe his defeat because on June 17, he led the first presidential poll against Ahmadinejad. He issued a statement, wishing the victor well and saying that he would not challenge the results, but lashed out at unnamed opponents who he said "spent millions to destroy my image and my family's image."

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the "meteor" of Iranian politics. Within a couple of years, he has been elected as president, rising from provincial governor, vice-minister of culture and Islamic guidance, and mayor.

Why did Ahmadinejad win the election? There are many reasons and some of them deserve mention:

First, Ahmadinejad advocated poverty elimination through subsidies and handouts as one of his principal slogans during the election campaign. His supporters have conducted a masterful election campaign that has shot straight to the heart of the oppressed. The oppressed includes ordinary workers, the poor and disaffected, and those sick of corruption and the class divide.

Although Iran is known to have the second largest oil reserves, its 70 million population are divided into three distinct classes: one third is poor, another one third constitutes lower and middle class, and the remaining one third is rich.

Iran's working class perceives little reward from Iran's oil assets, which earned huge money with spiraling oil prices. Ahmadinejad has captured the imagination of the first two groups, who voted for him. He is known to have a solid support base among religious conservatives. The combination of the support of the poor and the conservatives has worked wonders for him at the election.

The International Crisis Group representative in Tehran, Karim Sadjadpour, reportedly said: "The imbalance between upper and lower classes was one of the issues the revolution (1979) was supposed to resolve. Twenty-six years later it is still there."

As former President Clinton once has said, the central issue at any election is "the economy, stupid!" The Iranian election could be compared to the 2004 Indian election in which poor voters had put the Congress in power, while BJP was backed by elite voters who had mobile telephones and personal computers and cars.

Second, Ahmadinejad is known to be scrupulously honest in his personal life. He shuns affluent life style. He is seen as a person of integrity and lives in style that is no different from an ordinary Iranian. As the mayor of Tehran since 2003, he is known to have lived in a modest suburban style home, with sparse furniture. This was in sharp contrast to the life style of his predecessor, whose house had chandeliers hung from the high ceilings above marble floors. The house had a swimming pool, sauna, and gym.

Third, it is noted that the real power in the country lies in the hands of the spiritual leader. The president leads the government while major policies on domestic and foreign affairs rest with the spiritual leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Most Iranians have been disillusioned by the failure of outgoing President Mohammed Khatami in introducing further reforms. Many of his proposed reforms did not find favour with the spiritual leader. Therefore, whatever the candidate Rafsanjani promised for liberal reforms and privatisation and overtures with the US, voters knew that he would not be able to deliver them. Those promises seemed hollow to them.

Fourth, the President-elect is known to be fiercely loyal to the spiritual leader Ayatollah Khamenei. It is reported that the leader backed him during the election. Most voters thought that it was better to go with someone who would be able to deliver goods as promised because he had the support of the spiritual leader who had the final say in matters of state under the constitution.

Finally, the Bush administration did not help the reformist Khatami's regime. Although some European leaders considered President Khatami as "Iran's Gorbachev," the Bush administration listed Iran as one of the countries of the "axis of evil" with Iraq and North Korea. This has undermined the government of Khatami and the reformers.

Anti-Iranian US stance has played straight into the hands of supporters of conservatives, and most Iranian people were alienated with the US, and it helped Ahmadinejad. Most voters thought it was better to vote for Ahmadinejad because his government would have the support of other agencies of the government, controlled by conservatives. At last, Iran's president is in the hands of the conservatives, and the presidency will work as "knife through butter" in harmony and unison with the spiritual leader.

The victory in 1997 of the outgoing reformist President Mohammed Khatemi was due to a desire for social change. This election has been seen as catalyst for economic change that will be instrumental in eradication of poverty and corruption in the country.

All eyes are fixed on the new president to see how he balances his conservative views with personal freedoms that have been already in place among young people. Already the president-elect promised to form a government of moderation, calming fears of reformists in the country and Western nations. He has assured that Iran would not abandon talks on its nuclear programme with the European Union, although he firmly believes in Iran's right to development of nuclear energy.

Iranian Nobel Laureate Shirin Ebadi said that it made "little difference" who became the country's president because he had little voice on policies. Ebadi was of the view that whatever limited reforms the Khatami regime had been able to introduce since 1997, President-elect Ahmadinejad would not interfere, because the country might turn towards civil war. That is not in the interest of the conservatives, and the country's stability is paramount in the face of growing unease of the Bush administration over its nuclear programme.

Barrister Harun ur Rashid is a former Bangladesh Ambassador to the UN, Geneva.