Khatami dilemma echoes Iran’s place at a crossroads

FT.com - Remember Mohammad Khatami? He is the gentle cleric who had offered a reformist, acceptable face of Iran, captivated its young population and led it out of international isolation. Well, he might be back, if his allies have their way.

Mr Khatami, who served two terms as president, from 1997 to 2005, is under mounting pressure from reformists and moderate conservatives to contest next June’s election and spare Iran four more years of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad.

Whether he will heed the calls is the big question occupying Tehran’s political circles. Once the results of the US presidential elections are digested across the world, many powers will also start paying special attention to the Iranian race – and to the Khatami dilemma.

The argument the former president’s allies make is this: Mr Ahmadi-Nejad has turned the world against Iran and wrecked its economy. His populist policies have sent prices skyrocketing, hurting most those he claims to protect. And his defiance over Iran’s nuclear programme threatens to provoke military strikes from the US, Israel, or both.

Khatami allies have been telling their leader that he is the only politician with sufficient popular appeal to win a landslide victory and make it impossible for Mr Ahmadi-Nejad and his supporters in the regime to manipulate the outcome. Mr Khatami, they say, has a duty to save the country.

All this, of course, is more easily said than done. Assuming that Mr Khatami can sweep to victory – and that is a big if – it is far from certain he will be able to make an impact. Every big reform he pursued while president was blocked by the real forces within the regime, which are neither elected nor accountable. He used to say that he faced a crisis every nine days – this time it would probably be every single day.

When Mr Khatami left in 2005, he was disenchanted, and so were his supporters, because he had failed to deliver on his promise of transforming the Islamic republic into a more responsive, democratic government.

Although some of his social reforms did survive – young Iranians, even under the current government, have more freedom than in the early 1990s – the system he sought to change fought back with a vengeance, bringing to power the most fundamentalist wing of the conservative camp.

Since then, the regime’s strategy has been to prevent reformists from staging a comeback. That is why many reformist candidates were judged insufficiently Islamic and, therefore, disqualified in this year’s parliamentary elections,

Reformists say the supreme leader and final decision-maker in Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been set against them, convinced that they had weakened the Islamic republic, while Mr Ahmadi-Nejad has bolstered it.

While reformists suspended for a while the most controversial parts of Iran’s nuclear programme, without convincing world powers of its supposed peaceful nature, the current president has accelerated uranium enrichment. His policies have provoked a series of economic sanctions but, in the minds of the fundamentalists, the punishment has been worth the defiance.

Iran’s reformists are right not to give up. The country is in much worse shape than fundamentalists would have the public believe. A return of Mr Khatami to power is an appealing prospect. A mature reformist camp would not only hold the promise of reconciliation with the west but also of more rational domestic policies.

But Mr Khatami needs to decide quickly. If he chooses not to run, reformists should waste no time in joining Mr Ahmadi-Nejad’s other critics – and he has alienated many segments of society, including clerics and businessmen – round another single candidate.

Even if many ordinary people still believe that Mr Ahmadi-Nejad has their best interests in mind, and even if Mr Khamenei wants him to have a second term, it is not inconceivable that a strategy of unity and a clever campaign could still drive him out of office.

By Roula Khalaf - Financial Times