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Iran: A sea-change coming?

That Iranian President Ahmadinejad has, apparently, been re-elected will cause despair to many. He is a loose cannon in so many respects.

Over at Information Clearing House there is an interesting piece "US Media Campaign to Discredit Iranian Election" collating the responses of the US media to the Iranian election.

Meanwhile, a more sober assessment of what the Iranian election means for the future comes from Peter Beaumont writing in The Observer in "Genie of democracy won't go back in the jar":

"Ahmadinejad has adopted the guise of "a man of the people"; an enemy of elites and corruption; a figure who, via his long travels through Iran's provinces, has displayed himself as accessible, whereas the country's supreme leadership remains remote.

This is a man deeply anxious to be wrapped in the illusion, if not the reality, of a large popular mandate. Which leaves Ahmadinejad with a problem. What is to be done about the wishes of the tens of millions who voted for his rival, Mir Hussein Mousavi?

It is not only Ahmadinejad who must negotiate the challenge of dealing with the huge block of Mousavi supporters. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Ahmadinejad's chief sponsor, has the same problem. For, if last week's elections have proved one thing, it is that the reformist movement, which some had begun to write off as a spent force, is still appealing to huge numbers of Iranians. Ahmadinejad and Khamenei, if they do not want to deepen the fractious competition between reformists and conservatives, and between conservatives and a faction of hardliners, will have to find a way to negotiate those divisions to avert a political crisis.

In the immediate aftermath of the elections, the fear is that their answer will be the tactics of suppression used against the left at the beginning of the revolution. But those were different times. These days, for the revolution to continue it must appeal to new groups that have flourished under its aegis, not least those it has educated, who are often conservative yet find themselves frustrated at their country's stunted economic and political development.

And there is a still bigger challenge, one born of the campaign itself. The democratic process caught the collective Iranian imagination, following a series of enthralling live television debates and mass rallies which gave Iranians the impression that they were participating in a real election.

It is this idea that poses the greatest long-term threat to hardliners who hanker for the early days of the Islamic revolution, when politics was to be subordinated to clerical direction."

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