IRAN:After Ahmadinejad's elevation from mayor to president, local politics in Tehran looks attractive to the newly pragmatic movement, writes Gareth Smythin Tehran
Massoumeh Ebtekar's political career has taken her from spokeswoman and interpreter for the 1979 US embassy hostage-takers to the role of vice-president for environmental affairs under former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami. This week she is campaigning for a lower-profile role: a seat on Tehran's city council.
She is one of three former senior reformist ministers vying for seats on the council, a body all but overlooked until Tehran's former mayor Mahmoud Ahmadi-nejad was catapulted to the presidency in elections last year.
That poll saw reformists and followers of the conservative pragmatist Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani suffer a bruising defeat that led to 18 months of regrouping and repositioning. Now the reformists hope to regain their previous momentum by returning to the political grassroots.
The reformists are keen to shake off an image of being overly concerned with social freedom and political reform rather than bread-and-butter policies and are showing a new pragmatism in running a common list with appealing candidates and policies.
"There are fewer slogans these days but more maturity," says Mohammad Ali Abtahi, one of Khatami's vice-presidents.
Ebtekar says the city councils, established under Khatami in 1999, are natural turf for the reformists. "We have technocrats, people expert in city planning and the environment," says Ebtekar. "We have a plan to encourage public participation, stronger relations with NGOs and cultural activities. Tehran city council can be a stronghold."
With few citizens able to identify with a 15-strong council covering a population of 8.5 million, a key reformist promise is to establish more local sub-councils.
Politicians on all sides sense that a strong reformist showing could have significant effects nationally.
"If the reformists win, international pressure on the government will increase," notes Ahmad Tavakoli, a conservative deputy, "and there will be more pressure domestically. Government supporters will be disillusioned and blame the ones whose illusions of victory led to defeat."
The reformists' new realism, although less exciting than Khatami's presidential landslide in 1997 or the US embassy seizure back in 1979, is even infecting some who previously argued for boycotting elections on the grounds that change would be stymied by unelected state bodies controlled by conservatives.
Akbar Montajabi, a prominent journalist, recently wrote that his past support for boycotts had been a "meaningless game". "We have to be hopeful of reforms and reject a guerrilla and quasi-revolutionary approach," he wrote on his weblog. "Such behaviour will lead us nowhere."
Ebtekar is standing on a single list for the election put forward by reformists and followers of Rafsanjani. The list includes Khatami's former culture minister, Ahmad Masjed-Jamaei, and Mohammad Ali Najafi, his former vice-president.
Tomorrow will see municipal polls across the country - the first electoral test of Ahmadinejad's popularity since his presidential victory last year - but few doubt there will be a particular focus on Tehran. The city's annual budget has reached nearly $3 billion (€2.26 billion).
Although there are more than 1,200 candidates in the city, tomorrow's election looks like a three-way fight, with reformists facing a list allied to the current mayor, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, and another allied to the president and led by his sister, Parvin Ahmadinejad.
Although campaign posters have appeared only in recent days, activists expect a higher turnout than the paltry 11 per cent on which the conservatives triumphed in 2003, when Ahmadinejad was elevated to the mayoralty. "We think it could be 35-40 per cent," says Ebtekar.
Ebtekar sees a natural continuity in her life from the Islamic Revolution to her drive towards local government. For her, the Islamic Revolution was intended to create a more equitable relationship with the world's leading powers.
She was among the first Iranians last week to welcome the Iraq Study Group's recommendation that America should talk to Iran. "It is time we sat face to face and reviewed grievances, including the embassy takeover," she says.