The man now proving to be his own worst enemy

2nd April 2007
By Ali Ansari

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President Ahmadinejad swept to victory in the controversial Iranian presidential election of 2005. Heralding the renewal of the Islamic Revolution, he promised a radical overhaul of Iran’s economy, with oil money on everyone’s dinner table, an assault on the growing disparity in wealth with a dramatic programme for the redistribution of wealth, and a return to revolutionary Islamic values.

This diminutive curiosity with the populist touch caught the imagination and curiosity of the international media who provided the attention he was only too keen to court. To begin with, the Iranian electorate was content to give the first non-clerical president of Iran in over 20 years a chance to prove himself.

Ahmadinejad relished the opportunity afforded him and moved quickly to consolidate his position with an exercise in political theatre which was high on style if low on substance. He travelled extensively around the country, meeting with people and berating officials as he went. He brought with him money, lavishly bestowed on a grateful poor, and symbolically held his first cabinet meeting in the vicinity of the Shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad. To further emphasise his piety, he later instructed his cabinet to pledge their determination to fulfil their electoral promises personally to the Hidden Imam at the shrine in Jamkaran south of Tehran, from where Ahmadinejad believes the Hidden Imam will return and for which his government has provided a $15m face-lift.

This economic populism and political theatre was given added lustre by Ahmadinejad’s rumbustious performance on the international stage. If members of the political elite proved sceptical from the start and economists warned of the inflationary consequences of his policies, Ahmadinejad responded with vigorous nationalist rhetoric, having been provided with an ample platform for expression through the continuing nuclear crisis.

Just as Ahmadinejad berated his predecessors’ policies at home, so too he attacked their willingness for compromise abroad. Compromise had emboldened Iran’s enemies. The key to success on the international stage was to imagine the unimaginable. Iran was a great power again; it needed to apologise to no-one. It proved an intoxicating mix, and it was not only the Iranians who fell for it.

Yet the Iranian electorate discovered that its desire to elect a ‘straight-talking’ president proved double-edged. If Ahmadinejad did not disguise his motives, there were many who soon came to regret his lack of ambiguity.

It was one thing to be brash; it was another to invite ridicule. It was one thing to deny the legitimacy of the state of Israel; it was another to deny the Holocaust. It was one thing to berate the West for its injustice against Iran; it was another to argue that the world could soon look forward to the collapse of the United States — and, for good measure, Britain.

Pious Iranians applauded his religious devotions, but even the Ayatollahs looked askance at his intensely close attachment to the Hidden Imam, an attachment which was publicly expressed in his widely ridiculed belief that the Hidden Imam had visibly empowered him at a speech he delivered to the UN General Assembly.

Nonetheless, all this concern was subsumed under an aura of international success, made all the more vivid last summer with the seeming inexorable rise of Hizbollah and the failure of the Israeli assault upon Lebanon. Ahmadinejad seemed unassailable, riding high on the crest of a wave. Yet within months the tide had turned. Iran’s president, hitherto impervious to attack, was now the subject of intense criticism.

What went wrong? The reasons, as indicated above, were not hard to find: economic mismanagement, political arrogance and international incoherence. Indeed, for all the effects of the international crisis in defining Ahmadinejad’s woes, it should not be forgotten that the root cause of his difficulties are domestic, and the responsibility is, in very large measure, his alone.

Indeed, Iranians of all political hues were to soon discover that far from being the incorruptible straight-talker they had thought him to be, Ahmadinejad was to become as intoxicated by the paraphernalia of power as any of his predecessors had been.

What he lacked in financial corruption he soon made up for in political corruption, making it clear to his associates, and those who believed they had a stake in his electoral success, that he owed nothing to them and everything to his self-belief.

Indeed, political allies in the hard-line parliament soon found their new president to be a truculent and overly-confident individual who had no qualms about treating them with disdain. This was all well and good when it involved political theatre for the satisfaction of the masses, but it proved increasingly unforgivable when economic policy was at stake. They repeatedly challenged his nominees for the post of Oil Minister and criticised his indulgent approach to the budget. But they proved most anxious about his apparent neglect for their interests.

A large mercantile class found trade coming to a standstill as international tensions and economic incoherence was driving away foreign business. Most concern was levelled at policies which many considered, with justification, to be dangerously inflationary.

An engineer by training, Ahmadinejad’s appreciation of the basics of economics reflected the contempt for the subject attributed to his idol, the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini, that economics was ‘for donkeys’. Consequently he eschewed common sense for populism and ignored the advice of the Central Bank that a reckless cash injection into the economy, in addition to the abrupt reduction in interest rates, would simply fuel inflation. Matters were made worse by the fact that Ahmadinejad not only had contempt for the discipline of economics but disdain for its institutions, so that management of the economy was effectively withdrawn from the relevant departments of government.

Salaries were thus not raised in accordance with a managed plan, but cash handouts were liberally given to a grateful poor. Along with the reduction in interest rates, this exercise in economic populism simply resulted in forcing up the prices of basic goods.

While the politics of confrontation abroad may have excited a sense of nationalism and popular conformity, it also ensured a slow down in trade, the life blood of the middle and upper classes, which, when added to growing anxiety over continued international tensions, encouraged the flow of capital abroad. All this put further pressure on the Rial.

As if this were not bad enough, Ahmadinejad diverted money away from the formal welfare system towards the religious foundations, and also added for good measure that Iran was an under-populated country which could easily sustain a substantially larger population. Given his failure to address the unemployment problems, government officials and analysts alike stared in disbelief at this presidential encouragement to procreate.

The president therefore lay the foundations of his own political woes. However, as his opponents in Iran themselves admitted, it would take at least a year for these exercises in economic mis-management to bear political fruit. That they did almost on cue was a reflection not only of the scale of the economic incoherence but, crucially, hubris on the part of the president.

Following the war in Lebanon, Ahmadinejad felt himself to be on the crest of a wave, leading a country which by all accounts was settling in nicely as the regional hegemon. He could look forward to the forthcoming elections with some confidence, especially since his government had effectively suppressed all traditional channels of dissent.

Hubris was, however, to be his undoing. Disdainful of his opponents, he also proved dismissive of his traditional allies among the hard-liners. The consequence of this was a fissure in the hard-line conservative front, as Ahmadinejad and his former allies put in separate lists to contest the Municipal and Assembly of Experts elections of December 2006. Ahmadinejad put forward a list which included his sister, entitled the ‘Scent of Service’.

His opponents on the other hand saw an opportunity to dent Ahmadinejad’s political momentum and, by extension, his confidence in showing a resolutely united front, symbolised by the renewed co-operation between former Presidents Khatami and Rafsanjani. Perhaps of more importance than this new alliance of interests were the ingenious methods with which political activists sought to circumvent the various obstacles put in their way by Ahmadinejad’s government.

Lacking a substantive press presence, and with little recourse to funds (other than private means), Ahmadinejad’s opponents resorted to decentralising the management of the movement, leaving mobilisation of the vote to local cells which communicated through the internet and mobile phones. In essence they turned to word of mouth, refined by the deft use of modern technology to bring out their vote.

While the election to the Assembly of Experts was ably assisted (in this case) by renewed vetting by the Guardian Council, which basically left voters with the choice of moderate and hard-line conservatives, the Municipal elections were relatively open.

The high turnout resulted in a clean sweep against Ahmadinejad and his one-time allies. Rafsanjani took the top spot in the Assembly of Experts by a wide margin, while moderate conservatives and reformists took control of every council in the land including, crucially, Tehran City Council, which fell to allies of the new Mayor, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, a determined opponent of the president.

In the words of one parliamentary deputy, the elections were a big NO to superstitious sentiments, irrational expectations, delusions and thoughts with no relation to experience or expertise.

While Ahmadinejad sought to put a good spin on the results, announcing that the voice of the people had been heard, it soon became apparent that the people wanted to be heard a little longer. Indeed the elections proved to be the starting gun for an unprecedented attack on the president’s policies, with a litany of attacks from a professional elite who had hitherto deemed it politically prudent to remain discrete.

The priority target was the state of the economy, made all the more acute by the announcement of UNSCR 1737 and the imposition of sanctions, a development Ahmadinejad had said was impossible. Needless to say, Ahmadinejad made the task easier by remaining resolutely aloof and determined to proceed with a range of cultural policies, including a decision to proceed with a ‘Holocaust’ conference at the foreign ministry in December.

Possibly the only good thing to come out of this fiasco was an awareness by the broader Iranian public that their president’s idiosyncratic political views could no longer be ignored. Nor, indeed, could they afford to remain indifferent to the politics of their country. With his political opponents, especially Rafsanjani, reinvigorated and empowered, politics, so long subsumed under the rhetoric of nationalism and the defence of Iran’s nuclear rights, had suddenly come alive again.

It would be folly and somewhat premature to issue a death certificate for Ahmadinejad and his views. There is still undoubtedly life in the president yet and his self-belief is unlikely to be easily derailed. But recent events show that it was no wiser to have buried the Reform Movement with such indecent haste back in 2005. On the contrary, all the signs are that rumours of its death were vastly exaggerated.

Ali Ansari is Reader in Modern History at the University of St. Andrews and author of ‘Confronting Iran: The Failure of American Foreign Policy and the Roots of Mistrust’ (C Hurst and co, 2006).

Filed Under: , Middle East, Iran, Ahmadinejad, Nuclear Proliferation
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