The Jasmine Revolution, born in Tunisia some five moths ago, has spread across North Africa and the Middle East. While pro-democracy protests and the associated state crackdowns continue, outside interest is steadily waning. Recent democratic wrangling in Iran, for instance, failed to made front page news, overshadowed by such occasions as the Royal wedding, the events in Pakistan surrounding Osama bin Laden, and questions regarding the stability of the governing coalition as a result of recent electoral outcomes.
In the time since the spawning of the revolutions, only two Arab leaders have been toppled. While four are under sustained heavy pressure, with UN and NATO military involvement in Libya, dictators are managing to hold on. The remaining fifteen Arab leaders have been relatively unaffected, experiencing only minor protests. Despite a strong and encouraging start, the success rate of the protests in terms of enacting reform has been limited. The next leader to fall may, then, come from outside the Arab world. Enter Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
In contrast to scenarios playing out in Syria, Libya, Bahrain and the like, the threat to President Ahmadinejad’s reign comes not from the outside, but from a power struggle within the establishment itself. (Tehran has continued to voice support for the government in Damascus amidst accusations of assisting the Assad regime to violently suppress protests – hardly surprising when considering the brutality with which the Green movement was crushed in Iran following the 2009 presidential elections.) When the president discovered that the minister of intelligence, Heidar Moslehi, had been bugging the offices of Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei, Ahmadinejad’s trusted chief of staff and close personal friend, Moslehi was promptly issued with his marching orders. However, in a move that effectively disenfranchised Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who dislikes Mashaei’s nationalistic views and socio-cultural liberalism and has previously rejected his candidature for a ministerial role, reinstated Moslehi – a conservative whose outlook is more attuned to that of the establishment. Angry at Khamenei’s efforts to interfere in the running of the cabinet, Ahmadinejad boycotted his duties for eleven days, skipping two cabinet meetings and cancelling an official visit to Qom.
Rather than a cosmetic shootout concerning the composition of the cabinet, the underlying struggle for power could shake the Islamic Republic to its very foundations. With Iranian security forces preventing more than a dozen demonstrations since February, Khamenei’s actions appear to have been motivated by self-preservation; with the pro-democracy movement threatening to spill into the republic, the Ayatollah looks to have sought to reassert his dominance, thereby preserving both his position and the political system itself by disempowering a president who has increasingly espoused conceptions of an Iranian state based on nationalism and free from clerical influence. However, in doing so, Khamenei runs the risk of further agitating pro-democracy sentiment; with the Supreme Leader being above politics, and therefore being unelected, any notion of democratic legitimacy provided by an elected president (the 2009 election was heavily criticised and widely condemned) has been trampled. In the unlikely event that the Jasmine Revolution successfully penetrates the Islamic Republic, the repercussions for the regime could be more intense as a result.
Ahmadinejad, owing to his increasingly nationalistic outlook and preference for the Revolutionary Guards as a guiding force, is understood by senior clerics as posing a sincere threat to the republic’s composition. The president’s visions of guiding Iran in a new direction, reconfiguring the internal distribution of power in favour of the elected leader, coupled with a series of documentary films portraying Ahmadinejad as the embodiment of a mythical religious figure who will accompany the “Hidden Imam” on the Day of Judgement, have given rise to accusations from within the establishment that Ahmadinejad is influenced by religious “deviants” who believe in supernatural powers and djinns (spirits). This has been divisive for Ahmadinejad, with many supporters of the president backing Khamenei: Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, a religious mentor of the president, openly criticised Ahmadinejad, opining that the ‘restoration of anti-clerical thinking could be the next great sedition in this country’ and warning that rebelling against the Supreme Leader was tantamount to ‘apostasy from God’. Such accusations are inherently harmful to the regime, assigning to the president a religious status transcending that of the clerical establishment and thus questioning the legitimacy of the Iranian regime.
Nonetheless, with calls for a closed debate on the president’s boycotting of official duties (read: calls for impeachment) being overlooked, the target of the clerics’ displeasure appears to be Mashaei rather than Ahmadinejad. With Iran’s constitution barring more than two consecutive presidential terms, Ahmadinejad cannot run for office in 2013. Instead, it seems the president is attempting to groom Mashaei as his successor, though having long claimed not to need the clergy to interpret religious texts for him, many within the clerical establishment have taken the view that it is Mashaei who is the real source of influence. With the clerical establishment determined to prevent the rise of Mashaei, it appears that the only way in which Ahmadinejad can retain meaningful power is to submit to Khamenei’s will and dispense with Mashaei’s services.
The timing of the affair is unlikely to have been coincidental. With parliamentary elections scheduled for 2012, Ahmadinejad has a vested interest in controlling the intelligence ministry; with the department being charged with conducting background checks on potential candidates, an opportunity to veto potential challengers and secure a strong majority for backers of the president was undoubtedly a consideration for Ahmadinejad. In this respect, the president could be the architect of his own downfall, prompting conservatives and clerics alike to band together to safeguard the establishment. For Geneive Abdo, while Khamenei's victory may have preserved a political system that is not fully understand in the West, crucially, it is one that remains somewhat predictable; the survival of Khamenei and the conservatives once referred to as “hard-liners” by the West is now preferred to the erratic and volatile Ahmadinejad. With the Ayatollah’s unconditional support no longer a certainty, the president may well see out the remainder of his term as a lame duck.
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