The Diplomat | July 27, 2010
By Meir Javedanfar
Ultra conservative criticism of Ahmadinejad is growing and Khamenei’s fatwa looks desperate. Will regime in-fighting boil over?
Since the Iranian revolution of 1979, an ongoing and constant battle has been raging between different factions of Iran’s ruling elites over whose opinion should have more sway with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Between 2005 and the presidential elections of 2009, this battle was fought mainly between ultra conservatives (who supported President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad) and reformists, ultra conservatives and moderate conservatives, and then again between ultra conservatives and reformists. Yet because the main issue revolves around the Supreme Leader himself, such debates have generally been held behind closed doors.
Not anymore.These days, the battle is being fought out in the open, but with a twist—the most visible opponents to the status quo are the ultra conservatives, who are now taking on Ahmadinejad.
‘In Iran, a new movement is appearing which wants to say that it’s more revolutionary than the Supreme Leader. This new movement wants to pit the supporters of Hezbollah (the original Hezbollah party, which is based in Iran and later had an offshoot in Lebanon) in the society against the Supreme Leader, and to make this movement problematic for him. This new movement doesn’t want to see the country in peace and tranquility. It even wants to vacate the surroundings of the Supreme Leader from others and only keep itself in his proximity. And when this happens, it will want to say that we are the only ones who stayed, therefore all authorities should be surrendered to me because I won 25 million votes.’
Who would make such radical remarks about the intentions of the president? It wasn’t the reformists Mehdi Karroubi or Mir-Hossein Mousavi. The comments were instead made on July 22 by Mehdi Mohammadi, the political editor of the ultra conservative Keyhan newspaper. Indeed, in the same speech, he went as far as to describe the movement behind Ahmadinejad as ‘the third pillar of sedition.’
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