Word: rafsanjani
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...promising jobs, improved health care, educational and professional opportunities and to let ?Iranians feel the effect of oil money on their dinner tables.? Now he has to deliver on those promises, which are similar to those made 26 years ago by old-guard revolutionaries such as former President Akbar Rafsanjani, whose failure to deliver may in large part explain why Rafsanjani lost the election to Ahmadinejad...
...unassuming Ahmadinejad, 48, defeated the wily political veteran Ayatullah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, 70, who ran on a pragmatic platform that promised accommodation with the West. But Rafsanjani could not consolidate support from the country's liberal and progressive voters who were wary of his family's largely unexplained wealth and unhappy about the corruption that grew under his watch as President from 1989 to 1997. So while Iran's economically disadvantaged classes, Islamic militias and web of religious social-action groups provided Ahmadinejad with 62% of the votes, Rafsanjani could muster only 36% in a country almost evenly split...
...biggest winner in this election is Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei. Since succeeding to the head of the theocracy with the death of Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989, Khamenei has always had to contend with rival conservatives like Rafsanjani or with reformist Mohammed Khatami, who has held the presidency since then. While that office has always been much less powerful than that of the venerable Supreme Leader (Khamenei, while theoretically above politics, runs Iranian foreign and nuclear policy from behind closed doors), the presidency has been a strategic bully pulpit for those with ideas different from the theocracy...
...field of seven candidates, Ahmadinejad won about 19% of the popular vote, nowhere near the more than 50% needed to become President outright. But the favorite, the pragmatic Ayatullah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, 70, won only 21%, hence this Friday's runoff vote between the two. The reformers on last week's ballot, supporters of the policies of outgoing President Mohammed Khatami, were badly trounced and now see in Ahmadinejad's smiling face a stealth campaign by Iran's conservative ruling ayatullahs to take the presidency, denying it even to Rafsanjani, who has his fair share of hard-line credentials...
...runoff campaign began online and in the media as soon as the official results were established, with reformists throwing in their lot for Rafsanjani and conservatives supporting Ahmadinejad. Even though George W. Bush has dismissed Iran's elections as undemocratic, the country's liberalizing and conservative forces know that victory depends on a strategy the U.S. President can appreciate: turning out their base in a country split down the middle by ideology. --By Nahid Siamdoust