Ahmadinejad gets explicit: there is only one party

NYT analysis that notes how brazen Ahmadinejad is becoming in his words and deeds WRT declaring the Revolutionary Guards a single-party dictatorship.

Having successfully suppressed the opposition uprising that followed last summer’s disputed presidential election, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his supporters are now renewing their efforts to marginalize another rival group — Iran’s traditional conservatives.

Conservative rivals of Mr. Ahmadinejad are fighting back, publicly accusing him of sidelining clerics and the Parliament, pursuing an “extremist” ideology, and scheming to consolidate control over all branches of Iran’s political system.

“Now that they think they have ejected the reformists, maybe they think it is time to remove their principalist opponents,” said Morteza Nabavi, the editor of a mainstream conservative newspaper, in an unusually blunt interview published Friday in the weekly Panjereh. Iranian conservatives, including Mr. Ahmadinejad’s group, prefer the term “principalism” to “fundamentalism.”

The strikes that broke out in the Tehran bazaar last week, while provoked by a proposed income tax increase, reflect the growing rift between the conservative factions, with the merchants, or bazaaris, on the side of the traditionalists.

Mr. Ahmadinejad has often fed the traditional conservatives’ fears; he has referred to the divide among conservatives, warning that “the regime has only one party” in a speech published Monday on his official Web site that provoked outrage among his conservative rivals.

“I think we are seeing a kind of Iranian McCarthyism, with Ahmadinejad disposing of all the people who are not with him by accusing them of being anti-revolutionary or un-Islamic,” said an Iranian political analyst, who refused to be identified for fear of retribution.

More to the point, those of the original revolutionary generation, with ties to Khomenei, are being reduced:

The rift is partly a generational one, with Mr. Ahmadinejad leading a combative cohort of conservatives supported by Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards. On the other side is an older generation of leaders who derive their authority from their links to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution in 1979. Reformist lawmakers now represent a largely impotent minority in the Parliament.

Ahmadinejad, feeling confident in his president-centric single-party state, now consolidates his grip, signaling a further diminishment of the clerical elite.

Comments

[Linell]

Can anyone tell me why Iran, with its current regime, is still allowed to be a member of the United Nations? So many Charter violations ~ so many innocent people in Evin prison ~ so many university students banned from attending university because of their religion ~ so many years!! And now one party? What sort of "democracy" is that?

Sorry - just venting. Have been teaching English online to uni students in Iran for 2 years now because they're not allowed to attend university until they recant their Faith. Not a term goes by that I don't shed several tears from their stories. Awesome, awesome youth ~ insane regime!