Seeking a Pragmatist; Iran election: Will Rafsanjani Run?(Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani)

Byline: Maziar Bahari

This June's presidential election promises to be a bittersweet one in Iran. The current president, Mohammad Khatami, was elected in 1997 as a reformist. He made many promises to the country's moderate majority, but has lacked the power and skills to deliver them. In the years since, Iran's clerical hard-liners have tightened their grip on power and swung the country back to its bad old revolutionary days.

Though the election is only three months away, nobody has officially declared his candidacy. That's because the hard-liners in the Council of the Guardians, the body that supervises every election and parliamentary bill, will to a large extent manage the outcome. Registered presidential candidates will be vetted by the council, and those deemed undesirable will be forced out of the race. A couple of uninspiring reformists are mulling bids, as are, on the other side, various militarists--individuals who are either former members of the Revolutionary Guards or are supported by them. They represent the extremist tendencies Iranians hoped Khatami would deliver them from.

In such a repressive environment, the next president will not be a democrat. That's left many Iranians hoping for the next best alternative--that a pragmatist will run and win, somebody who can defang the hard-liners and perhaps shift power back to Iran's elected officials. That person could be Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was Iran's president from 1989 to 1997. At 71, he now heads the Expediency Council, a body that mediates between the various branches of the government. His supporters are starting to campaign for him, but so far Rafsanjani has kept everyone guessing about his intentions. He is not hugely popular--according to a recent survey, he has the support of at least 25 percent of the voters in Iran. But Mashallah Shamsolvaezin, a reformist journalist who's been criticized for supporting Rafsanjani in the past, considers him the best of a bad lot. "The choice at the moment is between absolute evil and relative evil," says Shamsolvaezin. "There is no chance for a reformist candidate. So the choice is relative evil: Mr. Rafsanjani."

The consensus in Iran is that Rafsanjani will become a presidential candidate only if he knows he will win. In the parliamentary elections in 2000, he was publicly humiliated ...