Ahmadinejad Courts Diplomacy

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is on course to win a second term in next month's key presidential race. To ensure he can push through his radical agenda, he is aiming to secure a mandate with the Iranian electorate. A diplomatic breakthrough with the US is among the priorities he is pursuing.

Barring extraordinary political developments, Amadinejad will be re-elected either in the first or second round of voting. This is the prevailing opinion among the Iranian elite as well as an assessment based on the strength of hard evidence.
For the 12 June election, Ahmadinejad has the unqualified backing of the main pillars of power in Iran - including the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards Corps of Iran (RGCI) - not to mention the support of key constituencies like conservative voters and young Muslim militants.

In addition to this, despite widespread disgruntlement with his economic policies, particularly among the poor, Ahmadinejad has managed to secure the support of new voting blocs. For instance, hundreds of thousands of farmers soon will be nominally eligible to receive token cash payments of $80 each as part of the government's controversial privatization plan.

Certainly, Ahmadinejad is patently ill-prepared to live up to many of the promises he has made and it is impossible to gauge - even for the Iranian intelligence agencies - the exact political impact of these moves on the voters. But there is little doubt that the impact will be quite tangible given the over-enthusiastic way with which the national broadcaster IRIB routinely portrays the president's activities and sidesteps any criticism.

On the opposing side, despite the fact that the majority of Iranians have a neutral or negative opinion of their president, this will not be translated into a groundswell of support for his reformist opponents. Voters have not forgotten how former president Mohammad Khatami's attempts at reforming the system was systematically subverted and blocked by hard-line intransigent forces. Many - more than one-third of the electorate - are expected to stay away from the polls.

A landside victory?

Although nothing seems to stand in the way of an Ahmadinejad re-election, the size of his vote is a significant factor in what will follow. For instance, if he wins with a small margin of, say, less than 10 percent, his opponents could then claim that nearly half the population is opposed to his policies. Conversely, achieving a large mandate - particularly if he manages to top his own 17 million votes in 2005 - will make it much easier to push through his radical policies.

"To judge by his own words, President Ahmadinejad is aiming at no less than a radical overhaul of the system," said an Iranian academic who has served as part-time advisor to a number of government agencies. "The proposed changes are at the level of both the political economy and the polity and it is naturally encountering major entrenched opposition from within the regime."

According to the academic who spoke to ISN Security Watch on condition of anonymity, Ahmadinejad is no visionary, and although he famously lacks a clear view of how he intends to reshape the system, he has excellent political instincts; instincts that might come in handy in the next few weeks.  

Aside from the tactics stated above, Ahamdinejad and his advisers are using the full panoply of available state instruments for a big win on 12 June. For example, in the last four years, he has made significant inroads among the populations of the provinces and small towns. Last year, the government announced that from now on, farmers would be eligible for comprehensive health insurance benefits. Housewives are said to be the next group who will be eligible for these benefits in 2010.

Needless to say, in neither case has the government made commensurate increases in budgetary allocations nor has it made major commitments to the Ministry of Health and other agencies. But the political impact of these decisions is expected to be tangible this election day.

For example, in each of the 50 or so trips he has made to the provinces, the president usually promises the sky to the voters and anyone who has any kind of grievance is encouraged to send a personal letter to him for assistance. Practically all the three and a half million letters sent to Ahmadinejad so far have been answered with a verbal promise of support of some kind. The letters all bear the president's signature and are supposed to have been written by him personally. 

New strategy

While the Ahmadinejad’s domestic campaign strategy is fairly well-exposed thanks in part to the intrepid work of the Iranian journalists, its foreign policy component is largely unknown - few people are aware that he even has a foreign policy side to his electoral strategy.

An important clue to this was external pagerevealedcall_made when the Swiss newspaper Neue Zuricher Zeitung (NZZ) published the personal memos of Swiss President Hans-Rudolf Merz, taken when he met privately with the Iranian president a day before the controversial Durban Review Conference on Racism was to open in Geneva in April. It is not clear why Merz has decided to hand over his memos to the paper, but what is important is that they provide a valuable insight to Ahmadinejad's campaign strategy.

In the memos, Metz writes: “Ahmadinejad said that he was unhappy with the state of (US-Iran) relations. Ahmadinejad added that he was hopeful they could change. He said that if Obama wanted, he could undertake that change. He said the first step should be taken by the US side. The change must occur in the near future because it would be much harder if it arrived later. Ahmadinejad asked that the message be sent to Washington."

As many experts have noted, behind the fiery anti-Semitic and anti-American rhetoric that has become the hallmarks of the Ahmadinejad presidency, lurks a desire by the hard-line president to establish diplomatic relations with the US. The most immediate benefit accruing from such a move at this point in time would be a huge outpouring of support from the Iranians which will translate into millions of additional votes for Ahmadinejad on 12 June.

Before the Swiss president, a former Iranian top official had also revealed Ahmadinejad's true objectives. Ali Falahian, the hard-line former intelligence minister, told the Fars news agency: "If Ahmadinejad can, through an efficacious use of diplomacy, and without loss to our national interests, foster a change in the behavior of the Americans or in bilateral relations - so that for instance sanctions are lifted - then he can win the election without any other contributing factors."

The recent international incident over the arrest and subsequent release of an Iranian-American journalist on questionable charges should be seen in this context. The date of Roxana Saberi's sentencing conveniently coincided with Ahmadinejad's trip to Geneva where he personally intervened on behalf of the jailed journalist for her release. According to Swiss Foreign Ministry spokesman Lars Knuchen, in his meeting with Merz, Ahmadinejad promised to try to external pageresolvecall_made Saberi's case as a good-will gesture.

While Ahmadinejad's motives are to a large extent made apparent from his recent gestures, very little, apart from some broad generalities, is known about the Obama administration's negotiating tactics vis-a-vis the Iranians. For instance, is the US president anxious to start a thaw with Tehran to ease the pressure on the Afghan and Iraqi fronts? If so, is he only angling for the best possible deal or there are other mitigating factors involved such as Iran's nuclear program? Has Ahmadinejad given Obama an offer he cannot refuse? How would all this mesh with recent US assurances to the Israelis and the Sunni Arab regimes that it would not abandon their interests in talks with Tehran?   

Currently, there is a great deal of jockeying-for-position going on between the two sides. Moreover, there are so many variables and unknowns involved in the situation that it is practically impossible to predict the outcome with any degree of certainty - this may be true even for the participants themselves. However, a number of key facts are known.

First, the website Tabnak, published by former Revolutionary Guards head Mohsen Rezai, external pagereportedcall_made on 11 May that days before Saberi's unexpected release from custody, an important message was communicated to a deputy of Iranian Foreign Minister Manoochehr Motakei from the US State Department. This shows a degree of understanding reached between the two sides which must satisfy Ahmadinejad to some degree.

Second, according to the French Foreign Ministry, Iran has yet to respond to an official 8 April request by the 5+1 countries for a high-level meeting with Iran's top nuclear negotiator Said Jalili, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council. Clearly, had Ahmadinejad had the upper hand in that council, Iran would already have responded positively to the 5+1 request. This means other factions present in the council are equally anxious to deny Ahmadinejad a landslide victory next month. (It is entirely possible that the Supreme Leader himself may be among those people.)

In the end, Obama may be tempted to warm up to Ahmadinejad before 12 June in the belief that a pre-election Ahmadinejad may be a more willing negotiating partner than a post-election one. Be that as it may, some of Obama's advisers are probably aware that a post-election Ahmadinejad fortified with an electoral mandate would be negotiating from a far stronger position than one without.