Iran vote seen as referendum on Ahmadinejad

TEHRAN -- Nineteen months after an upset election victory catapulted him to a controversial role on the world stage, firebrand Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is facing criticism from both the left and right, much of it from Iranians who believe he hasn't delivered on his populist economic promises.

In national elections today, many Iranians view the vote as a referendum on Ahmadinejad's performance. City council races nationwide focus on who can do more to improve people's daily lives, with some candidates vowing to accomplish what they say the president has failed to do. And candidates for a key national assembly of Muslim clergy are clashing over how much power Iran's supreme leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, should wield.

But at both the local and national levels, the races pit supporters of Ahmadinejad against members of the reformist movement, which pushes for democratization within Iran's Islamic government. And in some cases, traditional conservatives have banded together with reformists to oppose Ahmadinejad allies.

Reformist candidates are taking a page from Ahmadinejad's play book, emphasizing bread-and-butter issues like the need for better public transportation and more accountable city officials instead of the human rights and freedom of speech themes they've sounded in the past.

"We need to show the world that we are more practical," said Piruz Hanochi, an architect running on the reformist ticket for Tehran's city council. "After the election, people's lives have to become better."

To the outside world, Ahmadinejad (pronounced ah-MAHDI-ne-JAD) is best known for spurring confrontation with the West -- restarting the uranium enrichment program that the United States believes is aimed at making a nuclear bomb; denying the Holocaust and calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map"; and declaring that Iranian influence should replace American sway in the Middle East.

But to Iranians, the president is controversial for a different reason: In May 2005, Ahmadinejad, a newcomer to the national political scene, shocked the country's reformists by trouncing their veteran candidate, former president Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Reformists had led the country through more than a decade of gradual social and political liberalization, relaxing religious dress codes and allowing more press freedoms under former president Mohammad Khatami. But their focus on ideology eventually soured as Iranians increasingly struggled with double-digit inflation and rising youth unemployment in a country where 70 percent of the population is under age 30.

Some of that disappointment is now being directed at Ahmadinejad, even among some of his core supporters.

Amirhussein Jaharuti is a natural Ahmadinejad voter, a strong believer in the 1979 Iranian revolution whose older brother died in the 1980-88 war with Iraq and who says the president's tough stances against the West have defended his country's honor. He voted for Ahmadinejad, but now plans to split his vote in the local races between reformists and pro-Ahmadinejad candidates because the president hasn't delivered enough.

"I'm sure he wants a better life for Iranians, but his policies haven't provided it," said Jaharuti, co-owner of an Internet provider in Tehran. "He is like a pilot who can't fly very well -- he doesn't mean to kill anyone."

Traditional religious conservatives with a pro-business bent -- the heart of Iran's bazaar culture and a base of support for the revolution -- are also skeptical of Ahmadinejad's policies, which briefly raised the minimum wage, spent more oil money on imports, and handed out patronage.

"We are against fat governments," said Asadullah Badamchian, a leader of the Islamic Coalition, Iran's oldest Islamic party, which is backing Ahmadinejad's city council candidates, but with reservations. "We think that, as in America, big companies should have influence in economic policies."

Inflation this year hit 15 percent, according to official figures, but independent analysts have put the figure at closer to 25 percent. Growth over the past two years has slowed from 7.5 percent a year to 5 percent.

Even more dissatisfied with Ahmadinejad are young, urban, middle-class Iranians. They are the backbone of reformist support, and many sat out presidential elections last year to register their disillusion with the system. That decision helped bring Ahmadinejad to power.

Now, the reformists are trying to make a comeback, focusing on getting out the vote and reminding voters of the liberalization they enjoyed under Khatami, who was president from 1997 to 2005.

"We are the companions of Khatami," reads a yellow campaign poster for reformist candidates in Isfahan, about 240 miles southwest of Tehran.

The city of 1.5 million is part of Iran's conservative heartland, but many young people here said Ahmadinejad's tenure had emboldened vigilante groups who patrol the streets to enforce strict Islamic order, making it harder for young men and women to socialize, without delivering the economic improvements he promised.

"It was a mistake not to vote last time," said Mohammad Paknegad, 24, a Khatami supporter who is studying English and who works nights as a cashier in a tea shop under the Si-o-Seh Bridge, where the Zayandeh river rushes between tables of young men smoking waterpipes beneath the narrow arches. "Things got worse."

But many voters in Tehran and Isfahan say they don't believe their vote makes a difference -- especially after many reformist candidates were rejected as unqualified or unsuitable by the Guardian Council, a powerful body of clerics appointed by the supreme leader.

"This is far from democracy," said Sayyid Ali Mirhadi, a reformist cleric from the National Trust party, which backs a coalition of reformist and conservative candidates -- led by Rafsanjani -- for the Assembly of Experts. The 86-member body chooses the supreme leader, the cleric who is the ultimate authority in Iran, and at least theoretically supervises him.

Mirhadi's slate of candidates wants the council to exercise more of its supervisory power, while their opponents -- led by Ahmadinejad's spiritual mentor, Mohammed Taghi Mesbah Yazdi -- want the supreme leader to have virtually unlimited power.

"The leader of the Islamic Republic is the leader of the Muslim world, so we cannot put any limits on him," said Mohammad Ali Ramin, an adviser to Ahmadinejad and a backer of the Yazdi group.

Those views so trouble traditional conservatives like the Islamic Coalition that they are backing Rafsanjani's slate of candidates despite their cultural disputes with reformists.

Ramin, a top campaign adviser to Ahmadinejad's allies, buses supporters to large rallies where their opponents are painted as wealthy, secular Iranians against a humble, religious man.

"God helped us to elect Ahmadinejad," said one student speaker at a Tehran rally last week. "Now the enemies of Islam are disapproving of him."