Iranian President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad appealed for unity Saturday after his fundamentalist movement overwhelmed the country’s struggling reformers and centrists in a lopsided election. But opponents braced for what they feared would be curtailed freedoms and a more confrontational foreign policy.
“Today is a day when we have to forget all our rivalries and turn them into friendships,” Ahmadinejad said, even as his defeated opponent, Hashemi Rafsanjani, expressed anger at what he called “institutionalized” interference in the voting.
In his first statement since winning Friday’s runoff, Ahmadinejad, the ultraconservative mayor of Tehran, told state radio his mission would be a powerful Islamic state that could be an example for the world.
U.S. concerned
In Washington, White House spokeswoman Maria Tamburri expressed concern Saturday about the fairness of the election.
“We strongly support free and fair elections through which the Iranian people can express their will,” Tamburri said. “We have expressed our clear concerns about the recent elections where over 1,000 candidates were disqualified from running, and there were many allegations of election fraud and interference.”
Nonetheless, the magnitude of the hard-liners’ triumph appeared to signal a watershed moment in Iranian politics, reversing the eight-year experiment with Islamic reform started in 1997 after the first inauguration of President Mohammad Khatami.
The old status quo, in which different arms of Iran’s government were moderate while others were conservative or fundamentalist, is no more. In the new alignment, the governing bodies are united in one fundamentalist ideology under the control of the unelected supreme spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In this capital city, women voiced fears of a crackdown on their style of dress and makeup and worried that young militiamen would enforce other measures to halt the spread of Western culture or “un-Islamic” behavior.
One of the government’s chief political critics, however, speculated that the aim of the Islamic conservatives would be for a Chinese model state, allowing enough social and economic liberty to win the people’s acquiescence but coupling that with a repressive political system.
Despite the surprising sweep of newcomer Ahmadinejad’s victory over Rafsanjani, a former president, in the runoff Friday, racking up more than 61 percent of the vote, supporters of the mayor kept their celebrations muted most of the day.
A government official said that in the wake of the hard-fought campaign, marred in both of its rounds by allegations of official interference and intimidation of voters, Khamenei wished to avoid overt demonstrations that might heighten international tensions or internal divisions.
6 in 10 voted
Shortly after the vote was announced, Khamenei issued a statement thanking both candidates and the population at large for taking part. Final official figures indicated that fewer than 6 in 10 eligible Iranian voters turned out, down from the 63 percent participation in the election’s first round, but not as low as the first reports early Saturday indicated.
“Through a magnificent display of national solidarity and public participation, you have proved your firm resolve to defend national independence and bravely safeguard the interests of the country and the Islamic Republic establishment,” Khamenei said, according to IRNA, the Islamic Republic News Agency.
A close aide to Rafsanjani said the defeated candidate intended to raise no formal objections to the vote, but he was disturbed at the alleged support given by the military and militias to his rival.
Some people interpreted the 49-year-old Ahmadinejad’s victory as mainly a desire for generational change. But Ibrahim Yazdi, a former foreign minister who has been the leader of the banned Freedom Party, said it was a calculated seizure of power by the hard-liners.
“It is not a matter of changing the old guard. It is a matter of a new move by the military institutions to solidify their power,” Yazdi said, speaking to British Broadcasting Corp. Television on Saturday. “They have the majority in the parliament. They have access to the judiciary system. Now they want to have the executive branch of government totally in their possession.”
