Mass Confusion in Tehran

April has been a cruel month for Iran's sprawling conservative movement, that ill-assorted but powerful ensemble of Islamists that has dominated Iran's political life for most of the last three decades. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a prominent member of that exclusive club, is now on course to win the presidential seat for a second straight time on 12 June, but instead of mirth, gloom is setting on much of the movement.

With only nine days left for presidential contenders to register on 5 May, no major prospective presidential candidate - aside from two current reformist hopefuls - has so far stepped out of the shadows to declare his name.

This is truly bizarre. In all the past elections in the Islamic Republic, conservatives would announce their candidacy months in advance. The situation is reaching such Kafkaesque levels of absurdity that IRIP, Iranian National Radio and TV, which is the only source of news for most people, is acting as if there will be no presidential election coming. Otherwise, it would have to give exclusive coverage of the race to the only two running candidates, both of whom happen to be reformists.

Genie out of the bottle

While the conservatives universally greeted Ahmadinejad's victory in 2005 with a sigh of relief, a good many of them have since come to regret that fateful decision. Like the genie that has been loosened out of bottle, the Ahmadinejad phenomenon is now unstoppable.

Not only has Ahmadinejad refused to govern with his former allies, he has also blatantly chipped away at their political and economic power base. What's worse, since he has the unqualified support of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, fielding a strong candidate against him at this moment in time would be seen as acting against the explicit wishes of the ayatollah himself, not to mention giving a rare opening for the return of the hated reformists.

Yet endorsing Ahmadinejad for a second term has its own dangers and pitfalls.

For one thing, too close an association with Ahmadinejad's imprudent and erratic domestic policies could cost the conservatives an electoral set-back in the 2013 and 2012 presidential and parliamentary elections.

Second, Ahmadinejad's confrontational foreign policy could one day backfire and damage the movement's long-term interests.

Finally, a blanket endorsement would mean that they would have no leverage in their hand to keep him in check or to ask for concessions in future negotiations.

For his part, Ahmadinejad has made it quite clear he has no desire to either form a compromise slate or to take his former allies' demands into consideration.

For example, on 4 December, according to the centrist website Asre-Iran, he told the leaders of the Front of the Followers of Imam and Leader Lines (an umbrella organization of conservative groupings) that he felt no need either to change course or make a fundamental break with the policies associated with his first term in office as the group was calling for. Neither the Imam group nor the government denied this report.

A recent article in the newspaper Tehran-e Emrouz published by Tehran's moderate conservative mayor captures the vexing mood besetting the conservative movement. Entitled "Mass Confusion Plaguing Iran's Parties," the article says: "In 52 days, the electoral train will reach its destination but the puzzle of the political parties has not been completed yet.

"There are many parties in which their leaders are working in one campaign headquarters while their rank-and-file work in another. While some commentators put this down to the need to reach maximum consensus, the hard reality is that no political party has so far been able to a reach consensus on the election front. The situation is the same for all parties."

Further information on the mystery was furnished by Ali Motahari, an influential member of the elite who is the scion of a prominent clerical family and the brother-in-law of Parliamentary Speaker Ali Larijani. (He is also a regular visitor to the Supreme Leader's Office.) The hard-line newspaper Jomhouri Islami quoted Motahari recently as saying: "Neither one of the present front-running candidates are ideal for us. There is an urgent need by all the groups for new faces but they [these groups] are incapable of fielding new individuals. When asked, they all say, ‘we need to support a certain candidate,’ but this is hypocritical."

Motahari added: "When you get to the bottom of this, you find that instead of actually looking for a suitable candidate themselves, they are trying to lay bare the true intentions of the [Supreme] Leader."  

Rezaii’s travails

As of this writing, there are at least half a dozen campaign headquarters that are currently semi-active or not active at all but are all awaiting the go-ahead from their would-be conservative candidates. Amongst them are those of the current mayor of Tehran, one that belongs to a former foreign minister, one belonging to a current cabinet minister, one to a recently fired minister and one to the former head of the Revolutionary Guards, Mohsen Rezaii.

Rezaii’s travails have been particularly noteworthy. Rezaii is an important pragmatic-conservative politician who has been one of the most trenchant critics of Ahmadinejad government from the right flank. A few months ago, he put forth the idea of an inclusive coalition government, one that would encompass many of the moderates and a few of the radicals. The idea was immediately met with derision by government supporters and summarily rejected.

In the last two weeks, Rezaii's office has announced, on at least two occasions, an immediate press conference by the former commander where he would make his presidential bid. In neither case did the promise materialize. Finally, on 22 April, all local news agencies and most newspapers published a text issued by associates of Rezaii declaring that his campaign would kick off the following day. On 23 April, his office formally denied the report but promised that he would enter the race soon enough.        

Rezaii is no neophyte. He led Iranian forces against Saddam's armies during the 8-year war and is currently the secretary of the influential Expedience Council.

Rezaii is in an unenviable position. He knows, as indeed everyone in the elite does, that Ahmadinejad's re-election is a foregone conclusion - that is, unless someone like Rezaii from the conservative camp drives a vigorous campaign against the incumbent president, thus splitting the Right's vote and landing a victory to reformist front-runner Mir-Hossein Mousavi. But of course, this won't come to pass unless the conservative candidate in question is willing to commit the equivalent of a political Hara-kiri.

At the same time, blanket endorsement of the radical president or even neutrality toward him on 12 June would rob the anti-Ahmadinejad conservatives of the opportunity to influence his policies or personnel changes. Under the present dreadful circumstances, there is only one option left for an anti-Ahmadinejad conservative like Rezaii: To gain enough votes to deprive Ahmadinejad of a large mandate but not large enough to deliver the presidency to Mousavi, the reformist.

This option may also satisfy the Supreme Leader who is as concerned about Ahmadinejad’s sanity as anyone else but nevertheless needs the latter in the more-than-likely event of a confrontation with US President Barack Obama over the nuclear program - presumably, a smaller mandate would make Ahmadinejad less autonomous and more hemmed in.
But the big question is just how big - or more accurately, how small - a vote should someone like Rezaii aim at. After all, pre-election analyses are rarely an exact science.

A voter's premier

In a straight conservative-reformist contest between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi, Ahmadinejad is expected to win between 13 to 17 million votes against 9 to 12 million for Mousavi, assuming that the second reformist candidate leaves the race.

Clearly, even a tepid campaign by the anti-Ahmadinejad conservatives is fraught with serious risks since it can suddenly tip the balance dangerously in the wrong direction. For, in an extreme case, where Ahmadinejad wins 13 million and Mousavi 12 million, a little over a million votes won by someone like Rezaii would bring down the whole edifice for the conservatives.   

The important point to note here is that many Rightist leaders - particularly in the Revolutionary Guards and its paramilitary affiliate, the Basij - have on numerous occasions warned that they would under no circumstances tolerate such a scenario, i.e., even if Mousavi technically wins the election in the first round, he would never be allowed to actually win the presidential seat.

According to official reports, there are 385,000 election personnel providing oversight to 48,000 polling stations in the country. Under Ahmadinejad, many of the old personnel who used to be chosen from local milieu such as teachers, merchants and other town notables have been replaced with Basij militia members. In addition, the top Interior Ministry officials in charge of the election have also been chosen from the Revolutionary Guards. Finally, the hard-line Guardian Council charged with ensuring a healthy election process is itself politically allied to Ahmadinejad.

Ball in the Right court

The Right, therefore, is perfectly capable and willing to change the outcome of the June election through questionable means. But the issue is that this may come at an extremely heavy cost for them. It can, for instance, delegitimize the government at a time when world attention will be squarely focused on Iran's nuclear program, or worse, it can alienate the majority of the population permanently from the Islamic Republic. Therefore, massive and systematic voting irregularities will be used only as a last resort and not as the first line of defense.

In the last election, Ahmadinejad managed to capture a whopping 17 million votes. This was in the second round of voting, which unlike the first round was generally free of vote-rigging. Of the 17 million votes cast, roughly 7 million came from the traditional bloc of conservative voters who unfailingly vote for Rightist candidates. The rest, which was quite a novel development for Iran, came from the economic grievances of the lower classes who were under the impression that Ahmadinejad was a champion of the poor or an anti-corruption crusader. 

We could safely assume that half of the latter are now completely disillusioned with his presidency. However, this is partly compensated by two new developments.

First, in the last four years, Ahmadinejad has made several dozen forays into the country's provinces and remote areas where he has managed to win over several million new voters by grand promises and small-scale material contributions.

The second phenomenon is what can be called, for a lack of a better term, the attractions of "the Ahmadinejad chic." Many people, including members of the middle classes and even a few intellectuals, have fallen for Ahmadinejad's rough-hewn manners and his pseudo-Robin Hood romanticism. His outrageous flourishes at international forums are seen by this still-hard-to-gauge group as brave acts of defiance against an unjust and cruel world order.

As the high drama plays out in the next few days between conservative factions and groupings, attention should be focused on which individual from the Right will finally take the anti-Ahmadinejad mantle, for there is a small but finite possibility that that person may change a largely pre-determined outcome.