Ahmadinejad and Khamenei: End of a Love Story?

The rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidency of the Islamic Republic of Iran is a telling story of how the Islamic Republic under the leadership of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei operates. Ahmadinejad has been mistakenly perceived as the man of the people. The ascendancy of the son of a poor blacksmith to the prestigious office of president has been portrayed as the story of social mobility under the Islamic Republic. Once Ahmadinejad fell out of favor with Khamenei, some within Ahmadinejad’s circles tried to sell it as Ahmadinejad’s attempt to stand up to the Supreme Leader’s dictatorial tendencies.

So did Ahmadinejad the man of the people prove that someone with a humble background could become president of the Islamic Republic? Did Ahmadinejad really stand up to Khamenei for the sake of the people to curtail the Supreme Leader’s interference in the executive branch? In the more than hundred-year-old conflict between the democratic aspirations of the people of Iran and consecutive governments’ suppression, does Ahmadinejad stand with the people?

Ahmadinejad entered the presidential race in 2005 as an underdog. He was running against Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, a former president, and Mehdi Karroubi, former Speaker of a reformist-led parliament. Many Iranians did not know Ahmadinejad. His most prominent positions were governor of Ardebil province and mayor of Tehran. In those capacities, he did not get much national attention.

However, he became the president of Iran. How can one explain this? The short answer is that no one can. Both Karroubi and Rafsanjani made allegations of vote rigging, but Ahmadinejad had the support of the one man whose voice counts: Ayatollah Khamenei. Why did the Ayatollah support Ahmadinejad against the two well-known revolutionaries?

When Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of Islamic Republic, passed away he did not have an heir. The regime was facing a leadership crisis. No one else was as high profile, charismatic, and knowledgeable about Islam as Khomeini. Under controversial circumstances, Rafsanjani helped Khamenei take over the position of the Supreme Leader.

Once in power, Khamenei had to prove his legitimacy. He did not have a long revolutionary history, nor was he a scholar of Islam, and he had never been in Khomeini’s inner circle.

Faced with these problems, Khamenei gradually marginalized Khomenei’s inner circle and created a new class of officials. They had little or no revolutionary credentials, no appeal to the masses, and were not Iran-Iraq war heroes. Therefore, they owed their political life to the Supreme Leader. Khamenei could use them and dismiss them as he pleased. Ahmadinejad is one of those officials.

Ahmadinejad thus owed his rise to the Ayatollah. Khamenei gave the president unprecedented power because he trusted his own creature and demanded submission from him.

As Khamenei’s creature, Ahmadinejad had more leeway than other presidents. For instance, Ahmadinejad wrote a letter to President Bush. When the latter ignored the letter, Ahmadinejad wrote a letter to the American people. Ahmadinejad also wrote to Barack Obama and congratulated his victory in 2009. These appear to be trivial but in the Islamic Republic of Iran, this broke the taboo of reaching out to the United States of America, a country dubbed as the Great Satan by Ayatollah Khomeini.

After four years as president, Ahmadinejad had to face the electorate once again in 2009 to either renew his mandate for another four years or be replaced by someone else. Once again, Khamanei came to Ahmadinejad’s aid.

In a fraudulent election, Ahmadinejad was once again made the winner. Millions took to the streets in different cities to protest against the result. The Supreme Leader did not budge. Bullets, batons, arrest, torture, and rape were among the government’s response to the people’s peaceful protests.

Supreme Leader had to pay hefty price, both internally and internationally, to keep his president. He demanded absolute submission from Ahmadinejad, but that did not happen. On 17 July 2009, Ahmadinejad appointed Esfandiar Rahim-Mashaei, his close friend and relative, as Iran’s First Vice-President. The next day Khamenei sent Ahmadinejad a letter asking him to dismiss Mashaei.

Mashaei had been accused of having heterodox religious and political views. In a system that necessitates religious and political orthodoxy that is in line with Khamenei and his associates, other ideas were not going to be tolerated. Ahmadinejad tried for a week to convince the Supreme Leader to let Mashaei stay, but the Ayatollah was as adamant as ever. Mashaei had to go. Ahmadinejad accepted Mashaei’s resignation on 25 July, but later President appointed Mashaei as his chief of staff.

Ahmadinejad believed that people who voted for him were the president’s supporters. He failed to realize that he had never had a social base. It was Khamenei who mobilized some sections of Iran’s population in Ahmadinejad’s support. The president had some support for sure, but the overwhelming majority of his adherents appreciated his close relationship with Khamenei and supported him because the Supreme Leader had made it clear that Ahmadinejad was his choice.

Ahmadinejad realized that he was losing support among his perceived constituents because of the Mashaei affair. He also knew that at the end of his second term he must leave office and with it the attention that he desperately sought. The attention-seeker president wanted to continue exerting influence in the Islamic Republic. Some observers believe that he and Mashaei wanted to have a Putin-Medvedev model for Iran.

To do so, he decided to expand his imagined social base to include the middle class, the reformists’ core constituents. Ahmadinejad and Mashaei thus started to glorify ancient Iran and promoted a new kind of twisted nationalism by talking about “the School of Iran” rather than “the School of Islam.” Mashei once stated that there are different interpretations of Islam. He argued that the purest understanding of the truth of the faith and Islam is the School of Iran. It was Iranians’ duty to teach the world about the School of Iran as opposed to the School of Islam.

This irritated many conservatives, including the Supreme Leader, who believed Islam gave Iran a higher purpose. For conservatives, Islamic identity was superior to Iranian identity, but Ahmadinejad and Mashaei were introducing a heterodoxy that saw Islam indebted to Iran. Many conservatives asked Ahmadinejad to fire Mashaei, but he stood by his friend against mounting criticism of his chief of staff.

The relationship between the president and the Supreme Leader took a turn for worse when Ahmadinejad on 17 April 2011 dismissed the Minister of Intelligence. According to Article 136 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the president has the right to dismiss ministers; therefore, Ahmadinejad was exercising his constitutionally enshrined right. However, the Supreme Leader is above the law.

Khamenei immediately wrote a letter to Ahmadinejad asking him to re-instate the minister. The president refused. In an act of defiance, Ahmadinejad stayed at home for 11 days and did not report to work; nor did he attend cabinet meetings. Khamenei could not care less. He wrote a letter to minister and ordered him to go back to work. Furthermore, the Parliament allegedly threatened to impeach Ahmadinejad. The president had no choice but to return to work humiliated.

From that moment onward, the conservative media increased their attacks on Ahmadinejad’s government and what they called a “deviant current” within the government. They maintained that some government officials, led by Mashaei, had deviated from the true path of Islam and the Islamic Revolution by their heterodox interpretations of Islam and promotion of ancient Iran and Iranian identity. They also accused the “deviant current” of financial corruption. Ahmadinejad and the “deviant current” had also failed to fully submit to the Supreme Leader; this was an unforgivable sin.

Ahmadinejad and the “deviant current” retaliated by increasing their pseudo-nationalist rhetoric and offered new interpretations of Islam and promoted new policies that contravened the official revolutionary line. The conflict continued until May 21, 2013 when the Guardian Council, the non-elected body mandated to vet presidential candidates, barred Mashaei from running for president. Ahmadinejad and Mashaei have been uncharacteristically silent, but it might not continue as the president’s thirst for public attention and desire for power may encourage the duo to take new course.

As illustrated, Ahmadinejad’s pseudo-nationalism and his glorification of ancient Iran are tools in his petty conflict with the Supreme Leader. Having lost the support of his imagined constituents, who were actually Khamenei’s supporters, Ahmadinejad has been trying unsuccessfully to woo the middle class in Iran.

The middle class, however, remembers, among other things, that the president called the protesters in 2009 a bunch “dirt and dust.” Ahmadinejad saw how millions of people took to the streets to protest against his second term as president. At that time he was in bed with the Ayatollah. Once his relationship with Khamanei deteriorated, he realized that people’s support might count.

Ahmadinejad was never the man of the people. He is Khamenei’s creature. The president made a strategic miscalculation. After the disputed 2009 election and the price the Islamic Republic paid to keep him in office, he thought the Supreme Leader would tolerate him even if he disagreed, so he decided to promote heterodox ideas to attract new supporters. That support did not materialize.

Khamenei was not willing to let his creature become too powerful. The story of the last eight years of Ahmadinejad’s political life is not about him. It is about Khamenei. Let’s hope Ahmadinejad now understands it.