Iran's Riveting Political Drama

AP Photos No matter who wins on Friday, this election season has been unlike any other in Iran, with Twittering political rallies, rancorous televised debates—and a challenger that has Ahmadinejad lifting pages from Obama’s playbook. The Daily Beast hits the streets in Iran to gauge the mood.

Plus, read more insight on Iran's election from other Daily Beast writers.

On Friday, Iranians go to the polls to choose a new president in an election that will have profound consequences throughout the globe, not least in the United States, where President Obama has expressed a desire for a thaw in relations with Iran.

Although some 400 candidates signed up to run for the office, the election has become a four-way race, with the incumbent, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, facing off against the even more conservative former commander of Iran’s dreaded Revolutionary Guard, Mohsen Rezaie; the popular reformist and former prime minister Mir Hossein Mousavi; and the perennial populist and leftist candidate—Iran’s very own Ralph Nader—Mehdi Karroubi. With only a few days to go, however, the contest is shaping up into a two-man contest—and an unusually bitter, increasingly raucous, and utterly absorbing one at that—between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi.

“Many of us made a big mistake last time by not voting, and we’re paying for it now. In these four years we went backward.”

Four years ago Ahmadinejad burst onto the political scene in Iran as a relatively unknown figure who shocked Iranians, and the world, by beating the powerful cleric and absurdly wealthy businessman Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani—whose net worth Forbes estimates at $1 billion—to become Iran’s first non-cleric president. Back then, Ahmadinejad ran on a platform of reforming the economy and rooting out corruption in the government.

Four years later, thanks both to a precipitous drop in oil prices and his administration’s reckless financial policies, Iran’s economy is on the verge of total collapse. As a result, Ahmadinejad has reinvented himself as the one candidate who could most effectively reach out to Barack Obama and responsibly open up the country to the international community—something all candidates agree must be done but with vastly different ideas about how to do so. In fact, Ahmadinejad’s campaign slogan is Ma Mitavanim…Farsi for “Yes, we can!”

Mousavi’s supporters have responded to Ahmadinejad’s reinvention with open ridicule. “Ahmadi bye-bye!” has become the favorite chant of the former prime minister’s young, green-clad supporters, who have spent almost every night dancing and singing in the streets, rallying for their candidate. Mousavi’s reformist challenger, Karroubi, has gone so far as to refer to Ahmadinejad and his inner circle of advisers as “delusional fanatics.”

In any other year, such language from a presidential candidate would have been unheard of. But this election has been unlike any other in Iran. Beyond the massive crowds and the unprecedented interest that Iranians have displayed in the election’s outcome, this is the first time that presidential candidates have actually debated each other on live television.

It has made for riveting political drama. In the first of six scheduled debates, Ahmadinejad, rattled by Mousavi’s accusation that he had “shamed Iran” with his foreign policy, held up a picture of Mousavi’s wife, Zahra Rahnavard—a professor of political science whose fierce campaigns for her husband have given her the nickname “Iran’s Michelle Obama”—and asked “Do you know this woman?”

He then questioned Rahnavard’s academic credentials and suggested she should not be campaigning for her husband. The attack backfired, pulling even greater support to Mousavi, especially from Iran’s massive women’s rights groups. The day after the debate, Rahnavard held a fiery news conference in which she threatened to sue Ahmadinejad for slander if he did not immediately and publicly apologize to her (no apology has been forthcoming).