A Gloomy New Government

The Economist:

“Serving the Iranian people”, intones Iran's new conservative president, “is more worthy than lording it over the world.” Less than a month after he was sworn in, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's already familiar pieties are looking like admissions of weakness. Last week, after making room in his cabinet for several nominees of the parliament, he watched, infuriated, as the same deputies withheld votes of confidence in four of his own nominees. A former mayor of Tehran, Mr Ahmadinejad is a newcomer to Iran's treacherous national politics. It shows. READ MORE

The president had seemed blessed after he was elected in June to replace Muhammad Khatami, Iran's hesitantly reformist president of the previous eight years. For the first time since the late 1980s, all segments of the state seemed united in support of the same (admittedly woolly) conservative principles, of anti-Americanism abroad and the promotion of revolutionary Islamist values at home. But the conservatives, it turns out, are riven by personality. To be sure of passing legislation, Mr Ahmadinejad needs the support of two rival conservative factions in parliament. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, is an exacting patron.

Like Mr Ahmadinejad, who is 48, the new cabinet is young; several of its members served, as he did, in the ultra-ideological Revolutionary Guard. But loyalties are split. The imprimatur of Mr Khamenei, who dislikes cultural liberalism and uppity journalists, may be detectable in the appointment of a hardliner to head the culture ministry, which oversees the press, and in the appointment of two clerics with questionable human-rights records to run the interior and intelligence ministries.

The president may not be able to pursue his declared goal of social justice with the energy he would like. After campaigning on a dirigiste economic platform, he has mysteriously entrusted the economy to a free-marketeer, Davoud Danesh-Jafari. Cutting unemployment is a priority for Mr Ahmadinejad, but Mr Danesh-Jafari's talk of privatising state assets could put more people out of work in the short run. And parliament's rejection of the president's nominee to be oil minister will prejudice his chances of transforming Iran's most crony-ridden and important ministry. The president has three months to propose fresh nominees for this and other posts.

In foreign affairs, there will be none of the conservative-versus-reformist disharmony that marred Mr Khatami's presidency. But the new man is unlikely to enjoy more influence in foreign relations than his predecessor did, especially now that Iran, having ended a nine-month freeze on all work to develop a nuclear fuel cycle, risks being referred to the UN's Security Council. Ali Larijani, Iran's new nuclear negotiator, and Manuchehr Mottaki, the new foreign minister, both take their orders from Mr Khamenei. Both are considered more hardline than the men they replaced. For his part, the prickly Mr Mottaki is unlikely to maintain the rapport his predecessor enjoyed with Jack Straw, Britain's foreign secretary.

“The government will be tough on the elite and soft on the masses,” predicts a local pundit. That would mean more censorship of films and books, yet continued toleration of the unIslamic dress and morals that have become common in big cities. But the president will at least be able to dole out some of the record billion in foreign exchange that Iran, thanks to high oil prices, expects to earn over the year to March 2006. Indeed, one of the cabinet's first acts after it convened last week was to set up a fund to help young people trying to get married and find jobs and housing.

And what of the reformists, those men (mostly) who populated Iran's political life for the past eight years and whose legacy is now in doubt? Mr Khatami plans a dignified retirement. A former culture minister has gone into exile; Mr Mottaki's predecessor as foreign minister has his eye on a top job in a university; others talk hopefully of regrouping. But there is little sign of them recovering power any time soon.