Page 2 of
2 The world according to
Ahmadinejad By Kimia Sanati
opponent in the second round, Akbar
Hashemi, complained of a systematic character
assassination campaign led by the militia arm of
the Revolutionary Guards, in which Ahmadinejad
once served.
The former mayor of Tehran
claims he spent very little money on his campaign
and that everything was done voluntarily by his
supporters. After his taking office, however,
allegations of municipal money spent for
unspecified purposes during his tenure
emerged. There have been
demands by the hardline parliament to investigate
the misappropriation of municipal money.
The hardline parliament's refusal to give
a complete vote of confidence to Ahmadinejad's
cabinet, of which four ministers were turned down
after much debate, was unprecedented. Even the
reformist Mohammad Khatami had managed to get
total approval for his cabinet from a parliament
opposed to reforms.
Core Ahmadinejad
supporters came from the Revolutionary Guards, the
Tehran municipality and the theological seminaries
of Qom, the religious heart of Iran. Many of them
were offered high administrative positions later.
His mentor, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi, himself a very
controversial hardline senior cleric in Qom and a
sworn enemy of reformists, was the only
high-ranking cleric to support his presidency in
2005.
Soon after taking office,
Ahmadinejad addressed the UN General Assembly in
New York. Reporting his achievements there to one
of the country's most prominent clerics, he
claimed he had been surrounded by a halo of light
when he was delivering his speech, implying divine
support for his person.
A film taken of
the meeting soon made the rounds and he came to be
known as Mr Halo of Light. Iran's leading
reformist newspaper, Shargh, was banned a few
months ago when it ran a cartoon depicting a
donkey with a halo around its head, braying at a
puzzled horse on a chessboard.
Many of his
critics see the claim of divine support, repeated
on other occasions as well, and some of the
president's other statements about himself, such
as having launched a "new revolution" or the world
becoming "Ahmadinejadized", as signs of a
narcissistic personality. The Iranian president
seems to believe he has a divine mission to revive
Islam and save the world.
Ahmadinejad is
also said to be a man of little tolerance for
opposition. Recently, just a few months short of a
parliamentary debate for next year's budget, he
forced vice president Farhad Rahbar, head of the
Management and Planning Organization, to resign,
allegedly for having opposed changes in the
organization he had ordered.
Ahmadinejad's
battle with private banks, the Parsian Bank in
particular, has been considered by others as
taking a personal grudge against the bank's chief
executive too far.
While mayor,
Ahmadinejad was not invited to cabinet meetings of
reformist president Mohammad Khatami. After he
became president, it was Ahmadinejad's turn to
refuse to invite Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, his
hardline rival in the presidential elections who
had been elected as mayor, to cabinet meetings.
Supporters of the two men are leading a
fierce battle against each other these days. If
the hardline camp fails to produce a single slate
of candidates, it is likely that their reformist
rivals will win. The new mayor is determined to
keep his post, however, and Ahmadinejad allegedly
refuses to enter a coalition with the rest of the
hardline and conservative camp if Ghalibaf, now
inclined toward moderate reformists, remains
mayor.
