Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s attack on supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hints at return

The outspoken former president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has hinted a return to politics in an unusual message to President Putin.

In his letter Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also alluded to the length of time that Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, above, had been in power. Picture: Getty Images

The outspoken former president of Iran has hinted at a return to politics in an unusual message to President Putin.

In the letter, shown to The Times, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad plays on close relations between the two countries in recent decades to urge Putin not to seek to extend his rule indefinitely.

However, the intervention also serves as a thinly veiled attack on Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, with whom Ahmadinejad fell out at the end of his eight years in office, and who shows no sign of loosening his grip on the levers of power that he has held in Tehran since 1989.

“The historical experience of Man hasn’t recorded an instance of good reputation for rulers who, one way or another, endeavoured to make their term unlimited,” Ahmadinejad says in his letter. His intervention comes at a sensitive time in Iranian politics and in relations between Tehran and Moscow. Putin has supported Iran’s position on the 2015 nuclear deal, which President Trump tore up, and both countries sent military assistance to Syria that was key to survival of the Assad regime.

However, Russia has also turned a blind eye to repeated aerial attacks by Israel on Iranian forces and their local allies in Syria, intended to impede the transfer of missile technology to allies such as Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Tehran is said to fear that Putin is encouraging Assad to do some kind of deal with Israel and the West to expel Iranian forces in return for a relaxation of sanctions. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Speaker of the Iranian parliament, was in Moscow yesterday (Monday) to deliver a “personal message” to Putin from the supreme leader.

The former President of iran Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Ahmadinejad’s letter was timed to coincide with the visit. He says he did not intend to “meddle” in Russia’s internal affairs but that he was concerned about the image a friendly power was presenting to the world, just as America’s “hegemony” was reaching its end.

“The right to governance, and determining fate, belongs to the members of the public,” he said, challenging Putin’s use of loopholes in Russia’s constitution to seek new terms in office. “This fundamental right is what God has bestowed upon humans, and no individual, group or power is entitled to divest or limit it.”

Ahmadinejad was in office from 2005 to 2013 and became known for populist anti-western rhetoric that was forcible but often tempered with humour and also a clear disdain for some of the fundamentalist attitudes of Iran’s religious establishment. Iran is formally run through a system known as Velayat e-Faqih, or rule of the jurist, which gives the religious authorities oversight of temporal politics, but in the last years of his presidency Ahmadinejad repeatedly clashed with the supreme leader.

Ahmadinejad tried to stand for a third time in 2017 but was disqualified. He is said to be considering another run for the presidency in June. With the supreme leader now aged 81, this round of elections is regarded as crucial to Iran’s future.

The former president says his admonishment to leaders trying to remain in office in perpetuity applies only to uninterrupted rule. “In fact, after at least one term of others being in office, opportunity and possibility revives for them to, if willing, enter the arena [again],” his letter says.

The Times