He'll win -- but what then?

While the first election that swept Mohamed Khatami into power grabbed the world's attention, it is his second turn at the ballot box that could determine the future of Iran. Azadeh Moaveni surveys the political scene in Tehran, and interviews a leading clergy close to the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei
For once, in the course of a numbingly dull presidential campaign, President Mohamed Khatami decided to turn on the charm. Inexplicably, he chose to flash his radiant smile and make his clever jokes not at an audience of voters, but at a room-full of journalists gathered for his single press conference of the election. As the voting day nears, Khatami has been busy appearing at rallies, commemorating the death of the late Ayatollah Khomeini, and defending his government's record on television. But save during this week's press conference, he has been uncharacteristically reserved on the campaign trail, his speeches surprisingly bland. "I was disappointed with him," whispered a prominent pro-reform member of parliament, at an outdoor rally in Tehran.
The president's reticence may be a result of his natural modesty; he loathes self-aggrandisement in others. But some reformers close to him also believe he finds it painful being challenged on issues about which he long ago chose to keep silent. The president's inscrutability may also be because he knows the election is a one-horse race; he has no need to disturb things by tackling difficult issues now. The nine other candidates on the ballot are all relatively unknown conservatives who are unlikely to gain any significant proportion of the vote, say opinion polls. According to an influential cleric close to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the conservatives failed to absorb the lessons of their 1997 defeat, and hence decided to abstain from fielding even a single serious candidate. "Running against Khatami would have been political suicide," he said.
With victory so likely, politicians are already fighting to shape the post-election political landscape. In answering general queries, Khatami has indicated that the agenda of his almost-assured second presidency will be similar to the first's. But this may not please his reformist allies. "I don't accept the title of leader of the reform movement," he said. "The people are the real leader." With Khatami's current political allies spinning varying interpretations of his pronouncements and talking about a gutsier parliament after the election, the space between the reluctant leader and his men could widen. A case in point is the subject of this presidential election as a referendum on reform. "We announced from the beginning that any election the opposing side didn't participate in would be seen as a referendum," said former Deputy Interior Minister Mustafa Tajazadeh, who was sacked from his position by the hard-line judiciary in May. Khatami, though, differed. "The election is an election," he insisted at his press conference, though he added, "But people are also choosing a direction, a trend of thought, as much as a person." Part of the agitation of Khatami's allies may also be because of nerves at the uncertain role of Khamenei. Reformists close to Khatami insist that for his second term to be even marginally more successful than the first, they need Khamenei on board. But Khamenei himself has refrained from putting his support behind Khatami, though as a senior aide to the president recalls, Khamenei had no problem showing his favour for Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri in 1997. Now the supreme leader's people are making it known that he is a balancer, a paternal figure who transcends the factional fray.
Because the election lacks any real rivalry, issues, perforce, are further from people's minds than ongoing political crises. The fate of 15 religious-nationalist intellectuals, who still languish in prison after a March sweep, was among the questions Khatami deflected at the press conference, saying he wished to avoid interfering in the affairs of other branches of the state. The hard-line judiciary arrested the mostly middle-aged intellectuals on charges of plotting to overthrow the regime. But a related matter did finally spur Khatami to break his reserve with a gnomic remark. The televised confession of a university activist who had ties to the intellectuals has their families concerned that psychological torture is being used in prison to exact confessions which could embarrass the reformists on the eve of the election. "What matters is a confession made without pressure, with the presence of a defence lawyer," said Khatami, in his first public criticism of the student's show-trial style confession. Such references give Iranians hope that Khatami's overriding commitment to stability has not neutralised the sympathies that won him their hearts in the first place.
Meanwhile, given how muted this year's presidential race has been, Iranians are disproportionately aware of the imminence of polling day. But not because of any sudden flood of campaign posters or last-minute attack adverts. Rather, attention is drawn by the reappearance of armed Basij (volunteer Islamic militia) checkpoints around the streets of Tehran. The Basiji style of moral policing (aggressive and indiscriminate searches of cars, interrogations etc) is the sort of unofficial interference in private life that most Iranians associate with a harsher past. But this week a simple drive home abruptly reminded many Iranians that, much as things have improved, there are still forces in society who wish to intimidate ordinary people, and there are still forces in government who permit them to. "I know they're doing this so we get discouraged and don't go out and vote," said Siavash Esfandiari, a university student who was interrogated for an hour after driving home with his female cousin after dark. "But we won't fall for it." President Khatami is banking on the support of young voters like Esfandiari, seven million of whom will be voting for the very first time this election. Despite his near certain victory, Khatami is keen to win as many votes as he can. Any drop in his support from his 20 million landslide of last time would allow his opponents to claim victory, without their having had to bother seriously to take part in the contest. As Khatami himself put it, "A president elected with a higher vote will be able to work more from the bottom of his heart."
The preliminary results of the Friday, 8 June vote should be available by late Saturday. Reformists do not expect any sort of vote-tampering of the kind that marred last May's parliamentary elections. "We'll have five different monitoring forces in the election headquarters," said Tajazadeh. "The possibility of cheating is basically zero."
When supporters of President Mohamed Khatami openly began declaring this year's presidential election a referendum on reform, the gulf between reformists and conservatives seemed unbridgeable. Conservatives first howled illegality, and then paused, hoping for low turnout that would hoist the reformists with their own petard. But now moderate conservatives in Iran are distancing themselves from the extremist hard-line, in hopes of achieving a goal they share with the popular reformists: consolidating elements of the status quo of the Islamic Revolution. Taha Hashemi, editor of the conservative newspaper Entekhab, is a leading light of the new moderate conservatives, called in Iran the "new religious thinkers."
With reformists comprising a spectrum from leftists who advocate dissolving the position and absolute power of the supreme leader (vali-el faqih), to mainstream reformists who follow Khatami's cautious path to change, Iran's moderate conservatives are promoting their movement as one that places limits on reform, rather than outright opposing it. "We're all a part of a religious government," said Hashemi.
Hashemi's moderate credentials are good. He even seems to advocate political parties as the next phase of Iranian political development. Some dissident activists even believe secular parties should be able to participate in a multi-party system, though Hashemi does not go that far. "The development of two or three political parties can be productive, and encourage people to vote for coherent plans instead of personalities. But more than that isn't useful. To have parties running around spouting idealistic visions just isn't feasible."
Hashemi's progressiveness extends to criticising the right for its election strategy. "When a party is defeated, it should go back and identify its structural problems, figure out the strengths of its rival, and incorporate them back into its own strategy," he said. "But the Right didn't do this after 1997, and this time around it fears defeat again. Well, the conservatives feel that because of the past, they won't get many votes. This is natural, as, with Khatami running, to run against him would've been political suicide." If Iran moves toward a party system politics, though, Hashemi believes politics will become more coherent. Now, "the conservatives comprise a front, not a party, and this means people can act on whim."
Whatever the system, Hashemi still argues for a supreme leader standing outside and above the factionalism. Close associates of Khatami were eventually expecting Khamenei to support Khatami's candidacy. Hashemi says that in 1997 supporters of Ali Akbar Nateq-Nouri tried to make it seem as though Nouri had the Leader's endorsement, when actually he had been impartial, like he is now. Hashemi would support Khamenei taking neither side. "Its not the Leader's place, as a cleric and supreme leader, to support a particular candidate against another," he said.
Perhaps because the supreme leader prefers to stand outside the rest of the political system, clerical associates of Khatami suggest the president may have lost hope of bringing Khamenei to the side of reform. But Hashemi insists it is wrong constantly to expect the supreme leader to intervene in faction battles. He mentions Khamenei's settlement of the Tehran vote in last year's parliamentary elections that the hard-line Guardian Council had been poised to annul. "Either people didn't see this, or then, on the other hand, expected him to interfere everywhere," he said.
Hashemi gives an approving example of when the supreme leader should intervene, eliminating the issues which make the political factions so divided. Under Iranian law, the supreme leader is responsible for outlining the country's broad policies, including foreign policy. Khamenei neatly took US relations out as an election variable in early May when he told worshippers at a weekly sermon: "We do not expect anything from America. We do not expect America to do anything [about the Palestinian problem]; it will not do anything, and in fact it is incapable of doing anything. The American government, the American ruling clique, is fully controlled by the Zionists." Still, Hashemi suggested that if tangible steps were taken, relations need not remain as bad as they are now. Unfreezing Iranian assets held since the revolution, or lifting the ban on the transfer of technology, for example, he said, could be offered as proof of the US government's good-will.
Conservatives like Hashemi hope that extremist clerics inside Iran stop embodying the face of a reactionary, intolerant brand of Islam. In kind, reformists hope that conservatives of Hashemi's ilk will begin playing the game of politics even when they risk losing. For both, a tolerant Islam and a democracy that functions are integral to displaying to the world a system that is capable of lasting. And of reforming.
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Related link:
Presidency of The Islamic Republic of Iran
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