Iran election: Ayatollah Khamenei’s shadow looms larger than any candidate’s

June 13th, 2013

Peter Nolan

Rather, it is the view of the candidates themselves. Mohammaed Baqer Qalibaf,
the technocratic mayor of Tehran seen by some as the leading contender for
the vacant presidency, summed up the reality in a recent television
interview when he characterised the president’s job as “to carry out
the programmes assigned to him by the [supreme] leader”.

Mr Khamenei is determined to have none of the shenanigans that followed the
last election, when accusations of rampant vote-rigging in Mr Ahmadinejad’s
favour presaged mass demonstrations and weeks of protest and upheaval that
shook the Islamic regime to its foundations.

Nor is he for putting up with up with more of the maverick tendencies
displayed by Mr Ahmadinjead, whose quixotic anticlericalism and repeated
challenges to the supreme leader’s authority amounted to insubordination.

Mr Khamenei has asserted control – by means of the guardian council, which
vets candidates and chose the nominees from an original field of around 700
– to ensure a pliant list that includes his son’s father-in-law and his own
personal foreign policy adviser. Even the leading reformist, Hassan Rowhani,
a moderate 64-year-old cleric, has ties to the leader by dint of his former
role as Iran’s nuclear negotiator.

Not that Mr Khamenei has ever been anything less than the pivotal figure in
Iran since he succeeded Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of
the original Islamic revolution, in 1989 and was charged with upholding the
unique system of rule by an Islamic cleric that his predecessor had created.

When I arrived in Iran in early 2005 as a British newspaper correspondent,
Khamenei’s image alongside that of Khomeini was everywhere, from murals on
the sides of buildings to portraits in hotels and offices.

Yet there were other characters – and forces – at play. Days before that
year’s presidential election, a young voter working in Isfahan’s grand
bazaar explained to me how Mohammad Khatami, the country’s outgoing
reformist president, had given Iranians a taste of freedom they had never
previously known.

The liberalising baton in that election was picked up by Akbar Hashemi
Rafsanjani, a septuagenarian former president and pillar of the revolution,
who became an unlikely gathering point for young Iranians seeking to
preserve a semblance of liberty amid the Islamic republic’s stifling
atmosphere of social restrictions.

Mr Rafsanjani and the supreme leader had once been close comrades but had
fallen out over relations with America, so the gossip mill had it.

So Mr Khamenei, determined to avert a direct threat to his authority, put the
state’s resources behind the then little-known Mr Ahmadinejad to facilitate
his victory – a task eased by Mr Rafsanjani’s unpopularity with many voters
because of his reputed corruption.

But in the end it backfired. The new president proved he was no lapdog but a
combustible force of nature, determined to plough his own furrow, to Mr
Khamenei’s fury almost much as to the dismay of the West.

Frequently provocative and occasionally entertaining, he generated headlines
at home and abroad. His heady populism and bold promises brought people on
to the streets, both for and against him, culminating in the mayhem of 2009.

It was no recipe for the political stability that Mr Khamenei – eyeing the
long-term survival of the theocratic regime – craves above all else.

Which is why, when Iranians go to the polls on Friday, they will be voting for
an option which does not appear on the ballot paper; the supremacy of the
supreme leader.

Source Article from http://telegraph.feedsportal.com/c/32726/f/568301/s/2d3d3b7a/l/0L0Stelegraph0O0Cnews0Cworldnews0Cmiddleeast0Ciran0C10A1181130CIran0Eelection0EAyatollah0EKhameneis0Eshadow0Elooms0Elarger0Ethan0Eany0Ecandidates0Bhtml/story01.htm