Iran's conservatives divided over presidential candidates

The Washington Post

TEHRAN — Conservatives aligned with Iran’s supreme leader may enjoy his support, but their inability to rally support behind a single candidate could hurt their chances of replacing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president.

With less than a month remaining before June 14 elections, no clear front-runner has emerged among a bloc of nearly a dozen conservative candidates, causing concern among allies who fear a loss of the power they have amassed over the years to rivals they say will move Iran away from clerical rule.

The final list of candidates will not be known until May 23 after the Guardian Council, a powerful body tasked with vetting candidates, completes its process. But the aspirants include at least two prominent hopefuls — the mayor of Tehran and a longtime foreign minister — from among a conservative grouping that had pledged to join forces around a single standard bearer. They also include a third prominent conservative, Saeed Jalili, Iran’s leading nuclear negotiator.

The group is known as principlists, a reference to their support for the founding principles of Iran as an Islamic republic. Despite often having tacit support from Ayatollah Ali Khamanei, traditional conservatives have not fared well in recent presidential elections, and they again face challenges from potential candidates who represent political beliefs they say are far removed from their own.

Among the conservatives, only the Tehran mayor, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, has demonstrated an ability to attract popular support. Qalibaf has been a proponent of information technology and environmental initiatives in the sprawling capital. But even he faces challenges from other conservatives who believe he, like Ahmadinejad, might abandon revolutionary ideals to improve relations with the West.

Another candidate, former foreign minister Ali Akbar Velayati, who served from 1981 to 1997, is now a senior adviser to Ali Khamanei, Iran’s supreme leader. While Velayati is widely believed to be Khamanei’s choice, his popularity is unlikely to match that of Qalibaf.

At the same time, hard-line conservatives now seem to favor Jalili, the nuclear negotiator, who has been receiving significant attention since last Saturday, when he registered to become a candidate.

The one issue that conservatives have come together on is in their attacks against the candidacies of former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad’s top aide, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, but so far they have been unable to repair divisions within their own ranks as time before the election dwindles.

“The reality is that several attempts to implement a process for reaching a consensus candidate have so far failed,” said Farideh Farhi, an Iran analyst on the political science faculty at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

There remains time for some among the conservatives to withdraw and throw their support to others, and it is possible that some of the candidates might not win approval from the Guardian Council, which is expected to announce some preliminary decisions as early as Thursday.

But experts say that strong differences have emerged among the group, particularly as some try to distance themselves from the policies of Ahmadinejad, who won reelection in 2009 as the choice of most conservatives but lost favor as a sharp rift emerged between the president and Khamanei.

Other observers say conservatives are searching for the most viable candidate to lead Iran out of the economic woes caused by mismanagement of the economy and sanctions on Iran’s vast oil and gas sector.

“There is a strong undercurrent pushing for an experienced manager with a good relationship with the supreme leader to come in and fix things,” said Mohammad-Ali Shabani, a London based Iran analyst.

Along with concern about diluting their base of support, some Iranian conservatives say they would be wary of any rush to consensus.

“The strategic mistake of the conservatives will be if they choose one weak candidate in the end,” Seyed Emad Hosseini, a conservative political analyst and a former member of Iran’s parliament said in an interview this week with a news Web site.