Iran election raises hope for change
Mayor of Tehran gearing for run
TEHRAN - One of the tallest telecommunications towers in the world looms above this sprawling city, a symbol of Iran's desire for global respect.
City officials leave no question about who should get credit for completing it: A pie chart in an official brochure shows that Tehran's mayor, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, made far more progress on the Milad Tower than his predecessor, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
It's a sign that the battle for Iran's presidency has already begun, with Ghalibaf - who has advocated better ties with the West - hoping to be Ahmadinejad's main rival in the June 12 elections.
During his 3 1/2-year tenure, Ahmadinejad's bombastic style has made him the face of Iranian intransigence in the West - refusing to suspend Iran's nuclear program and calling for Israel's demise. His defeat, even by a onetime hard-liner like Ghalibaf, would be welcomed by many in the West.
"Whoever wins the Iranian presidency is hugely consequential," said Suzanne Maloney, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a Washington-based think tank. "This is a chance to either perpetuate very negative trends or potentially for Iranians to crack open their own politics and create some new environment for change."
Iran has more political freedom than many countries in the region. Although Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, wields great influence and appoints a 12-member council that must approve all candidates, Iranian presidents are elected by popular vote to a four-year term, during which they set the tone for policies at home and abroad.
For many Iranians, the question is not whether to change, but how quickly.
Although Ahmadinejad is still popular with the rural poor, his reputation has soured among some conservatives because of the country's ailing economy. He has long been despised by Iranian liberals for rolling back social freedoms and cultivating a confrontational image in the West. This has prompted an unusual effort to unite both conservatives and liberals behind a compromise candidate to try to unseat him.
"For the first time, the far-leftists and the far-rightists are gathering together in party offices," said a politician with direct knowledge of the meetings who asked not to be identified. "They figure, if they want to make a change, they have to communicate."
Ghalibaf, the 47-year-old mayor of Tehran, has attended these meetings. As mayor of a city where Calvin Klein ads compete with portraits of war heroes and clerics, he is fashioning himself as a candidate of gradual change, who can appeal to younger voters while retaining enough conservative bona fides from his days as soldier to satisfy the powerful religious elite.
The meetings have also included former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezaee, members of the ultra-right wing party known as Motalefe, as well as politicians close to former president Mohammad Khatami, the flagbearer of the reformist movement, who is weighing another presidential run, according to news reports and politicians involved in the effort.
It is unclear what the meetings will accomplish. Reformers and conservatives have little in common besides their desire to remove Ahmadinejad, who still appears to retain the support of the Supreme Leader. Still, observers of Iranian politics say news of the effort is encouraging.
"Iranian democracy is evolving," said Ahmad Sadri, sociology professor at Lake Forest College in Illinois. Political parties "are recognizing that the opposition is there and they have to negotiate."
"I think you can see it as progress," said Maloney. "We are getting closer to a situation where Iran has full-fledged political parties that have specific agendas, specific leadership and clear constituencies. . . . You have this intense, fractious debate with political groups consulting one another and positioning themselves much in the way that parties in truly open societies operate."
Ghalibaf has portrayed himself as a candidate who could bridge the gap between hip Iranians who listen to iPods and watch bootlegged episodes of "Friends" and hard-liners who wince at Western influence.
He is so religious that his wife does not shake hands with strangers, as is custom for many devout Muslims. Yet Ghalibaf is also cognizant of the widespread desire among many Iranians for a more Western lifestyle. He reopened Azadi cinema, a famous theater which had been burned down by hard-liners and closed for over a decade.
"People would say Ghalibaf is a good candidate," said Sadri, a regular columnist for a reformist newspaper in Iran. "He appears 'cool' to young people and doesn't have the lumbering gait of the regular conservatives in Iran."
The son of a truck driver, Ghalibaf was born in 1961 in northwest Iran. He became a paramilitary volunteer in his early 20s and fought in the Iran-Iraq war. He learned to fly planes, and was promoted to commander of the air wing of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps by Razaee, the hard-liner who now is trying to consolidate the opposition behind a single candidate.
In 1999, Ghalibaf was among a group of Revolutionary Guard commanders who wrote to then-president Khatami demanding a crackdown on students protesting for greater freedoms. Hundreds of students were eventually wounded or killed. But when the Supreme Leader appointed Ghalibaf as police chief in the wake of those deaths, Ghalibaf was heralded for allowing the recruitment of female officers and introducing modern policing methods. In 2003, he squashed a second wave of student protests with no loss of life.
Ghalibaf resigned in 2005 to run for president against Ahmadinejad and five others, experiencing first-hand what happens when many contenders split the vote. He lost, but later was elected mayor of Tehran, giving him an international platform.
This year, he traveled to the World Economic Forum in Switzerland and hosted an Asian mayor's conference at the near-complete Milad Tower. He was also named one of 11 finalists for the 2008 World Mayor Award by City Mayors, an international think tank on urban affairs, for establishing neighborhood councils and trying to cure Tehran's legendary traffic woes.
A profile on City Mayors' website notes his "mercurial style" and "his signature claim to provide a 'balancing act' between the conservatism of the Islamic state's organs and the reformist aspirations of the people."
Ghalibaf has also struck a more moderate posture toward the West, telling Japan's Kyodo news service last month that Iran should do more to build trust over its nuclear program and that "there is a better way for dialogue with the world."
Relations with the United States have become a key subtext in this year's election in Iran.
Ahmadinejad - known for anti-US rhetoric - nonetheless appears to be portraying himself as the only candidate strong enough to reestablish relations with Washington, which cut ties after the 1979 Islamic revolution that led to the holding of American hostages.
"I believe Mr. Ahmadinejad is powerful enough to encounter the American government and the Americans will be pleased to struggle with such a powerful partner at the table," said Taghi Dejakam, deputy editor at Kayhan newspaper, a conservative newspaper. The reformists "did lots of things to restore relations, but they couldn't do it."
The economy is another critical issue, as US banking sanctions have hurt trade and falling oil prices have drained government coffers.
Ghalibaf has criticized Ahmadinejad's economic policies, including the distribution of cash to the poor. The rivalry between the two men has become unusually public. This summer, Ahmadinejad banned an edition of a city-owned newspaper controlled by Ghalibaf that featured an article exposing rifts inside Ahmadinejad's administration over the economy. "Ghalibaf will be a tough competitor," said Meir Javedanfar, a Middle East analyst. 