Iranian challenger

TEHRAN, Iran — Persian hip-hop thumps from car speakers and young men with spiked hair and women in spike heels dance in the streets.

It’s another night and another campaign rally-turned-party for their unlikely hero: a self-styled reformist from the early years of the Islamic Revolution who is now seen as their best hope to defeat hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

But while Mir Hossein Mousavi generates the noise, passion and electricity in Tehran, Ahmadinejad has the backing of the powerful Islamic establishment and deep support in the countryside, leaving Friday’s vote too close to call.


Much at stake
Mousavi would appear to have the momentum, drawing crowds and all-night street bashes. But all that noise, fervor and electricity don’t necessarily add up to a juggernaut, with critical stakes at play, including possible talks with Washington after a nearly three-decade diplomatic estrangement.
The post-midnight raves in Tehran’s suburbs are uncorking passions that seem to have caught even Mousavi by surprise. He stood in awe Monday at one end of a nearly 12-mile human chain of supporters along a Tehran thoroughfare, linked by green ribbons and banners in the color of his campaign.

What’s left in the final days before the vote is a political end game that’s rewritten the rules of Iranian campaigns. This time, the attacks have been nastier, the crowds wilder and the media war more acute than in past presidential races.

It’s partly because of the moment. Iran faces some pivotal decisions, including whether to agree to international demands to suspend its uranium enrichment program.

There’s pitched excitement in the reformist camp, which lost the presidency at the end of President Mohammad Khatami’s second term in 2005. Its supporters are convinced now that Ahmadinejad is ripe to fall.

Loyalists to Ahmadinejad laud him as a champion of the poor and forgotten, and rally behind slogans of patriotism and national pride.



by the associated press