It seems that Ahmadinejad is in trouble, and not only with the United States or the United Nations, but with the Iranian Supreme Leader himself, Ayatollah Khamenei. The president’s popularity is rapidly decreasing as his economic policies fail, and the nuclear rhetoric blows. According to a survey published by the national television, Ahmadinejad enjoys a meager 35% popularity. To get an idea of the situation, think about this. If they are lucky and earn an average salary, Iranians get about $100 per month. Inflation is so high that when they go shopping to their grocery stores, it is hard to find tomatoes because their price is extremely high. Kebab, salad and Iranian delicacies are shamingly left without the red vegetables. It is a small detail when compared to economic matters at large, but it gives a clue about the disappointment of the Iranians.
After suffering a defeat in local elections last December, the Iranian president had to face the open criticism of 150 out of 290 members of the Majlis, the Iranian parliament. They asked him to stick to their conditions in defining the budget for the upcoming Iranian year, which is starting this month. Meanwhile University students protested against his policies and several newspapers put forward some reservations about him. Massih Alinejad, a journalist of the Iranian reformist newspaper Etemaad-e Melli, explained to the Courier International the reason why her paper rebuked Ahmadinejad: “I took one of his speeches during the presidential campaign, and I compared it to his current speeches. He keeps making promises about the fight against poverty as if he were still campaigning. Similarly, he promised to reveal some secrets concerning the corruption which is poisoning our political and economic life. Nevertheless, he never did it.”
It is worth noticing that the criticism against Ahmadinejad is not coming from the reformers front only. According to The Economist, “conservatives in Iran’s parliament and press blame his extravagance at home and braggadocio abroad for Iran’s worsening economic malaise and for the unpleasant sense of being ever more squarely in the Americans’ firing line”. The English weekly continued with a significant hypothesis: “It seems that a clique of senior figures in the regime, perhaps including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei, have endorsed the criticism”. As a matter of fact, Jomhoury Eslami, a conservative daily in Tehran, that is known for is closeness to the Supreme Leader Khamenei, warned the president: “The government must not turn a deaf ear to its advisors, using the excuse that it is directly in touch with the people. Whether it wants to or not, the government needs a series of non-governmental advisors to support its actions.”
The idea of a fracture between Khamenei and Ahmadinejad is supported by Abbas Milani, director of the Iranian studies program at Stanford University, who believes that the majority of the Iranian leadership, except for Ahmadinejad and his followers, understood that confronting the West wouldn’t take Iran anywhere and could only be perilous. This is the reason why Ali Larijani, chief negotiator for the Iranian nuclear program, participated in the Munich Conference on Security Policy, at the beginning of February. And maybe that also explains why Ali Akbar Velayati, Khamenei’s chief foreign policy adviser, declared that suspending uranium enrichment might be possible. Much the same thing was said by Ali Rafsanjani, who ran for the presidency against Ahmadinejad and is still an important insider. He stated that the Islamic Republic is considering Vladimir Putin’s proposal to suspend enrichment in order to start negotiating seriously with the United Nations.
What does all this mean ? Did Khamenei and Ahmadinejad definitely break up? How is all this going to affect Tehran in the near future? Experts believe that Ahmadinejad will stay, at least until the next parliamentary elections in 2008. Bringing him down at this point would only make Iran look too frail in Western eyes. One must also be careful because Ayatollah Khamenei’s apparent opening doesn’t necessarily mean that Iran will stop pursuing the nuclear program. It seems that the fracture between the two is more in form than in substance, and that Khamenei’s reprimands were intended to calm down Ahmadinejad’s ardour and warn him to more consciously address Iranian internal problems, such as the economic crisis. This offers new space for negotiations, especially if the United States finds out how to take advantage of these differences, differences that a war might only consolidate.