Ahmadinejad Gets a Hardline Challenger

At one point it looked like the Iranian Presidential field was going to splinter on the reformist side, until Mohammad Khatami pulled out, leaving two reformers (Mehdi Karrubi and Mir-Hossein Mousavi) in the race.

On the harder-lining side, though, the field is now starting to splinter. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's successor as Mayor of Tehran, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, is expected to run, and now a real hardliner, former Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC, Sepah-i-Pasdaran) commander Mohsen Reza‘i, now Secretary of the very powerful Expediency Council, is running as well.

I'm not an Iran specialist, but given the fact that the IRGC is the most critical support constituency, by many accounts, of Ahmadinejad's rise to power, the decision of its former commander (from 1981 to 1997) to challenge him is interesting. Reza‘i has run for President before without much success, but he could really cut into some of Ahmadinejad's core constiutency, I suspect.