The Iranian elections managed to push local news to the side. It was not hard for Dina Ezzat to find out why With the unending political commotion in Egypt, the press has not shown much interest in some of the on-going political developments around the world. While news from the occupied Palestinian territories, Iraq and Sudan -- all of which are areas of direct Egyptian interest and concern -- still received adequate albeit not very close attention from the nation's dailies and weeklies, other major world stories were hardly covered, if at all. The Iranian elections, however, and despite the tense political relationship between Cairo and Tehran, proved the exception. From beginning to end, the international pages of the press -- semi- official, opposition and independent -- followed with varying degrees Iran's electoral campaign and its surprising outcome. On Monday morning, all the dailies came out with a 24-word news brief reporting that President Hosni Mubarak had sent a telegram of congratulations to Iranian President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Egyptian papers for the most part said nothing about the impact of the election of this hard-liner on the prospects of improving Egyptian- Iranian relations severed for close to three decades, since the 1979 Iranian revolution, but that has passed through a few periods of hope under the tenure of outgoing Iranian reformist president Mohamed Khatami. The head of the Egyptian interests section in Tehran said not a word in the Egyptian press and Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul-Gheit was quoted on Tuesday as saying only that Ahmadinejad was the choice of the Iranian people and that it was now up to Iran to make the right moves in the interest of Egyptian-Iranian relations. Again, the papers failed, or chose not to explain, what Abul-Gheit meant by saying it was up to Ahmadinejad to reverse the decision to name a Tehran main street after Khaled El-Islamboli who was involved in the assassination of former President Anwar El-Sadat in 1981. The Egyptian press, in what could be a political statement, dealt with the news of the Iranian elections in a matter-of-fact manner. It reported that King Fahd of Saudi Arabia (never reported to have fully recovered from pneumonia a few weeks ago), Morocco and the president of Syria had congratulated Ahmadinejad. The papers also reported concerns expressed by several Gulf, US and Israeli officials on the impact of the elections, with both sides expressing implicit and explicit worries regarding Ahmadinejad's foreign and defence policy plans. According to published statements by Abdel-Rahman Attiya, secretary-general of the Gulf Cooperation Council, Ahmadinejad needs to opt for friendly relations with Iran's Arab neighbours. Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Shimon Peres says Ahmadinejad needs to refrain from pursuing what Tel Aviv calls Tehran's nuclear threats. Obviously, prominence was given to the statement made by US Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld that "he's not a friend of freedom". The Egyptian papers, mostly in the international pages and rarely on the front page, published previous statements made by Ahmadinejad with much editorial emphasis on his shrugging off the US and paying scant attention to his promise to pursue friendly and closer relations with Arab countries. Actually, front page inches seemed to cater more to the allegations of defeated presidential candidate Hashemi Rafsanjani of vote rigging. Moreover, the editors of the international pages of the semi-official papers and a few pro-government independent papers gave little attention to statements by Iranian individuals and analysts that a key factor that worked in Ahmadinejad's favour was his relative youth, 48, in comparison to Rafsanjani's over-70-year age and his previous two terms in office. Instead they chose to focus on Ahmadinejad's firm commitment to gender segregation and his insistence as Tehran mayor that men and women civil servants in municipal office buildings use separate elevators. For their part, opposition and independent papers, especially those following an anti-US policy, reported the election of Ahmadinejad as a slap in the face of the US. "The big Iranian earthquake" was the headline of one editorial in the daily Al-Ahram on Monday. According to the semi-official daily, the election of Ahmadinejad indicated an unmistakable shift in the political mood in Iran from reformist to hardline. As such, Al-Ahram wrote, the election of Ahmadinejad "raises many questions" in relation to the impact of so much US pressure on Tehran that it could have prompted Iranians to elect a hardliner and put an end to Iran's reformist years. On Monday, Al-Ahram 's Editor-in- Chief Ibrahim Nafie dedicated his daily column "Facts" to the results of the elections. "Is Iran returning to the early days of the Islamic revolution and are we going to once again hear Iranians talk about exporting the principles of this revolution?" Nafie asked. He asked for an explanation about Ahmadinejad's post-victory statement that he will turn Iran into an example to be followed by many countries. Nafie was also worried about the impact of US policy in the region and the likelihood that such policies are likely to prompt a wider hardline mood across the Arab and Muslim world. In a rare moment of agreement, prominent Islamist writer and authoritative commentator on Iranian affairs Fahmi Howeidi concurred that the hardline policies of Washington were to blame for the election of Ahmadinejad who Howeidi wrote, is the response of the Iranian people to US threats of pre-emptive strikes against their country in order to abort their ambition to develop nuclear technology. "Growing anti-Americanism will not stop at the election of Ahmadinejad. Sooner rather than later the magic will turn on the magician," Howeidi wrote in his weekly article in the opinion pages of Al-Ahram on Tuesday. Al-Akhbar 's editor Galal Dweidar expressed similar concerns, predicting that Iran "will continue to be a serious headache for the US in the years ahead". Several news analysts and commentators including Al-Ahram 's Ahmed El-Sweifi and Ahmed Menissi predicted no major changes by Ahmadinejad who they predicted would more or less keep Iran's diplomatic relations where they stand today. Ahmadinejad, both analysts agreed, will dedicate more attention to the home front, especially economic issues. As El-Sweifi and Menissi argued, since Ahmadinejad owes most of his 61 per cent victory to the poor and disadvantaged he would have to dedicate time, effort and resources to improving their living conditions. There was very little comparison drawn in the press between the Iranian elections and the upcoming Egyptian presidential elections. On Wednesday, the front page of Al-Ghad, the mouthpiece of Al-Ghad opposition party, quoted the party leader and declared candidate for the September presidential elections Ayman Nour as saying, "the surprising election of Ahmadinejad will be replayed in Egypt." Egyptian presidential elections, Nour promised, are set "for an even bigger surprise". Perhaps, argued Magdi Mehana in his daily back page column in the independent Al-Masri Al-Youm. Mehana wrote that he was not sure whether Egypt is expecting "an electoral tsunami" like the one that hit Iran. "The regime of the National Democratic Party has gripped Egypt for 24 years. Will this be swept away by a presidential tsunami election... Or is the Egyptian hope like that of the devil going to heaven?" Mehana asked.
