WHO IS THE SUPREME LEADER’S MAN?

Saeed Jalili entered the race at the last minute and has emerged as a viable candidate. Yesterday he received the endorsement of Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi the ideological and religious father of the conservative principlists. Yazdi was an uncompromising supporter of Ahmadinejad and on numerous occasions had called his presidency "the will of the absent Imam," the Shi‘a Messiah. 

The guessing game continues in Tehran as the three competing conservative factions try to represent their candidate as the one favored by the Supreme Leader. Last week, it appeared that Ayatollah Khamenei was priming the nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili to become the next president. This week, however, the conservative papers as well as the reformists began to suspect that Jalili was acting as Ahmadinejad’s sleeper cell. While all eyes were on Masha’ei as Ahmadinejad’s Medvedev, a number of editorials suggested that Ahmadinejad successfully got the Guardian Council to qualify Jalili to run. If that is the case, the Supreme Leader will have a difficult time to throw his support behind a man who is also supported by Ahmadinejad, given that the outgoing president is now officially the black sheep of the principlist conservatives. Almost no one among the conservative elites trusts Ahmadinejad any more. What ever he touches turns to dust.

The 2+1 coalition from right to left: Mohammad-Baqer Qalibaf, Tehran's mayor, Ali-Akbar Velayati, former foreign minister and a trusted adviser of Ayatollah Khamenei, Haddad Adel, former speaker of the majles, and a close ally of Ayatollah Khamenei.

And then there is still the conservative coalition known as the 2+1. Originally, the plan was that from the three candidates of this coalition, two would step aside and endorse the third one at the end of the qualification process. Now that all three are qualified, none is willing to endorse the other. All three want to become the president. Yesterday, after a three-hour meeting all three reiterated that none is stepping aside in favor of the others. 

2+1 was supposed to represent the Supreme Leader’s wish, but now with friction appearing within the coalition and each candidate considering himself the best option, no one knows which one the Supreme Leader will eventually bring under his robe!

Qalibaf presents himself as a candidate of all classes. He tries particularly to appear appealing to Tehran's large middle class with a significant electoral weight.

In every single poll conducted by the conservative think tanks, the charismatic member of 2+1, Tehran’s mayor Mohammad Qalibaf, is substantially ahead of his other conservative rivals. But Qalibaf also is a wild card. He has ambitions of his own and is unlikely to become the “yes-man” of the Supreme Leader. 

The Supreme Leader has already learned from his experience of the last Tehran mayor to become president (Ahmadinejad), that he must empty the office of presidency from an institution of independent thinking. In effect, he wants to turn the office of the president officially into the executive wing of the Supreme Leader. After the last election in 2009, Ayatollah Khamenei made it clear that he will no longer tolerate a reformist president. Now his predicament is how to make his wishes a reality in an electoral process that remains unpredictable and difficult to manipulate.