Ahmadinejad aide given key promotion

TEHRAN, Iran – Iran’s president appointed his divisive confidant to a high-profile post Saturday in a move widely viewed as an attempt to boost the close aide’s profile ahead of his expected candidacy in next year’s presidential elections.

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad named Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei the head of the secretariat of the Non-Aligned Movement, the bloc of developing nations that Iran took over the leadership of this year. The post raises Mashaei’s political clout and gives him much-needed international experience.

Ahmadinejad cannot run in Iran’s presidential elections in June because of term limits, and he is widely believed to be grooming Mashaei, whose daughter is married to the president’s son, as his successor when he steps down in 2013.

The decision to promote Mashaei is seen as a challenge to Iran’s powerful hard-liners, and is likely to inflame the simmering political dispute with presidential elections on the horizon. The hard-liners denounce Mashaei as the head of a “deviant current” that they say is trying to undermine the country’s ruling Islamic system and elevate the values of pre-Islamic Persia and promote nationalism at the expense of clerical rule.

Mashaei is believed to have been at the root of a bitter political battle between Ahmadinejad and Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, over the choice of intelligence chief in 2011.

The challenge prompted many of Ahmadinejad’s erstwhile conservative supporters to switch sides and join his opponents, thus weakening the powerbase of hard-liners that the president depended on to secure his disputed re-election in 2009.