Conservative Ahmadinejad becomes Iran’s president

By Parisa Hafezi

TEHRAN (Reuters) – Conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became
Iran’s new president on Wednesday, taking power amid
international turmoil over Tehran’s nuclear ambitions and his
own past.

The 48-year-old conservative former mayor of Tehran, deeply
loyal to the values of Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution, won a
landslide election victory in June and was appointed president
by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

“I therefore … approve the vote of the nation and appoint
Dr Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as the president of the Islamic Republic
of Iran,” said a text by Khamenei read out at an official
ceremony by outgoing reformist President Mohammad Khatami.

Ahmadinejad takes the helm as Iran edges closer to possible
U.N. Security Council sanctions over its nuclear program, which
Washington says is a smokescreen for building atomic bombs.
Tehran insists its ambitions are peaceful.

In order to break this impasse, EU diplomats have been
trying to get Iran to surrender its nuclear fuel work in return
for economic incentives.

But Iran says such a compromise is unacceptable and that it
will resume part of the nuclear fuel cycle, a move that
threatens to end EU mediation.

OPAQUE SYSTEM

In Iran’s opaque political system, analysts are split on
whether top policy makers are somehow setting the stage for
Ahmadinejad to save the day with a new deal or whether he is
irrelevant to their greater national goals.

If this mounting international pressure on the nuclear
program was not enough, Ahmadinejad also faces numerous
accusations about his past.

The United States thinks he played a key role in the
storming of its embassy in Tehran immediately after the
revolution, something which he and those who took part deny.

Austrian investigators are looking into whether he was
involved in the murder of Kurdish dissidents in Vienna in 1989.
Again, his aides deny the charges.

Ahmadinejad also faces massive economic challenges in a
country where growth is slipping and oilfields, the country’s
lifeblood, are losing capacity.

The victory of the former Revolutionary Guard sent ripples
of fear through the investment community, compounded when he
said he would clean out corruption in the oil industry and give
no preferential treatment to foreign firms.

But analysts say investors should take a “wait and see”
approach, arguing that Ahmadinejad took a pragmatic line as
mayor of Tehran and could well do so again as president.