The widespread surprise at the victory of Tehran’s conservative Mayor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad should not tempt anyone into premature judgments about the man who has become Iran’s new president and the policies he is likely to pursue. The first thing to figure out is why this little-known former Revolutionary Guard won a landslide victory over the highly experienced former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, considered to be favored by the religious elite of whom he is a senior member. The pundits believed that in the unprecedented second ballot, liberal voters, many who had boycotted the first electoral round, would rally behind Rafsanjani, who had assumed a more reformist and pragmatic face in place of his past conservatism. Yet Ahmadinejad won an overwhelming 62 percent of the 22 million votes cast Friday. Claims of widespread electoral fraud can be discounted. There also seems no credible evidence of ballot box stuffing on the scale necessary to produce a result of this nature. Thus the key to Ahmadinejad’s triumph must lie in the electoral promises he made to the poor and unemployed. He vowed to narrow the increasing gap between Iran’s small rich elite and its many poor and to create work for those who are jobless.
This month unemployment reached a record 14.8 percent. An extraordinary half of all Iranian voters is under 25 — and the voting age is 15. In the next four years 5.5 million young Iranians are going to enter the job market. Under these circumstances, it is easy to see where a large bloc of Ahmadinejad’s electoral support came from. There was also the new president’s assurances that he would crack down on graft and corruption. Ordinary Iranians who formed the backbone of the 1979 Revolution and filled the ranks of the army during the bloody eight-year war with Iraq have seen little in the way of economic benefit. Ahmadinejad, the son of a blacksmith, presented himself accurately as a man of the people. He has been noted for his simple, almost austere life style since his appointment as the capital’s mayor in 2003.
His far more hard-line approach to the Americans and the international community over such matters as Iran’s nuclear program probably mattered less to voters than his domestic agenda, a fact so often overlooked in elections everywhere in favor of foreign policy issues which make much more gripping headlines. Given that the revolution is now a quarter of a century old, Ahmadinejad’s victory can in fact be seen as a rejection of the establishment which, despite the great hopes of millions of ordinary Iranians, has failed to deliver on a series of economic and welfare promises. Many in the religious establishment who favored their own man, Rafsanjani, will be uncomfortable at the outcome and may also be alarmed that for the first time the presidential palace is not occupied by a cleric. Others may regard Ahmadinejad as a brand new broom able to sweep clean the problems. It is now important that the outside world, particularly the Americans, hold their peace and wait to see how Iran’s new president begins to implement his campaign promises. He is in the end the choice of an overwhelming number of the Iranian people.
