Mahmoud Ahmadinejad , former President of Iran who was a zealous hardliner with popular appeal

yahoo.com · Mar 1, 2026 · Collected from GDELT

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​Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former President of Iran (2005-13), who has died aged 69, was an obscure figure when he was appointed mayor of Tehran in the spring of 2003, and not particularly well known when he won the second round run-off vote in the 2005 presidential election; yet over the next five years he established himself firmly as the West’s favourite bogeyman.In 2005 the international community anticipated a win for the incumbent president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, so Ahmadinejad’s landslide victory took the world by surprise. Ahmadinejad reportedly spent no money on the campaign, but he was backed by powerful conservatives who used their network of mosques to mobilise support among their mainly working-class congregations. He also had the support of a group of younger, second-generation revolutionaries known as t​he Abadgaran, or Developers, who were strong in the Iranian parliament. Most important of all he had the support of the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the 120,000-strong force created in 1979 to protect the Islamic RevolutionAhmadinejad focussed his domestic platform on poverty, social justice and the distribution of wealth inside Iran, promising to use oil money to cut the gap between rich and poor. If he succeeded, however, it was only because both groups were soon struggling to make ends meet. After his election Ahmadinejad embarked on a programme of bringing Sharia law to bear on Iran’s independent banking sector, which was crippled by a raft of restrictive measures. A low-interest loans scheme for small businesses, designed to encourage job creation, collapsed.Ahmadinejad: vigorously defended his country’s nuclear programme - AP Photo/Jason DeCrowMillions were spent on populist measures, such as the “Love Fund” to help poor young men meet the costs of marriage, and the minimum wage was raised by 60 per cent. The inevitable result was a huge exodus of capital as thousands of Iranian companies moved to Dubai and other places, followed by soaring rates of inflation and unemployment and plummeting economic growth. Even petrol was soon being rationed.The principal beneficiaries of Ahmadinejad’s mismanagement were the leaders of the Revolutionary Guard who were given top jobs in the administration and awarded huge government contracts, allowing them to make inroads into such strategic areas as oil and gas, infrastructure, telecommunications, missile development, nuclear energy, as well as less savoury operations.Millions of dollars worth of oil revenue was thought to have disappeared into individual pockets as the Guard mo​ved seamlessly into building airports, producing oil and opening mobile phone networks. In 2007, 150 parliamentarians – just over half of Iran’s 290 MPs – took the extraordinary step of signing a letter blaming Ahmadinejad for the country’s woes. By 2009 some 20 percent of the population were below the national poverty line.Ahmadinejad’s response to criticism was to play the nationalist card by attacking foreign “enemies”- Israel, the United States and that reliable old bugbear, Britain. Shortly after he became Iran’s president in 2005, he achieved global fame by calling the Holocaust a “myth” and inviting a motley collection of deniers and anti-semites to a conference in Tehran. His guests ranged from a former chief of the Ku Klux Klan to a raft of pseudo-historians.Most notoriously of all, Ahmadinejad later told a cheering crowd that Israel should be “wiped off the map”. His acolytes disputed this translation – although it was good enough for the official news agency, IRNA, when it reported his speech. He provoked further tension with the West by calling the September 11 attacks a “big fabrication” designed to justify a more aggressive US foreign policy.Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei listening to a speech by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after his confirmation as Iran’s President in Tehran, 2005. - REUTERS/Raheb HomavandiAhmadinejad also vigorously defended his ​country’s nuclear programme, insisting that Iran had a right to civilian nuclear energy and denying charges that the country was pursuing nuclear weapons. He continued his defiance despite the reporting of Iran’s nuclear programme to the UN Security Council over its failure to declare sensitive enrichment and reprocessing activities to the IAEA. “They should know that the Iranian nation will not yield to pressure and will not let its rights be trampled on,” he told cheering crowds in 2006, and he attacked what he called “intimidation” by the UN, which he accused of being a poodle of the United States.Ahmadinejad’s anti-diplomacy alienated the international community, but played to a rising wave of nationalism at home, and to the anger felt by the wider Islamic world over Israel and the invasion of Iraq. Nonetheless his re-election in 2009, by a claimed margin of 28 per cent over his reformist rival Mir-Hossein Mousavi, sparked a wave of internal unrest amid allegations that the vote elections had been rigged. In the months that followed, millions of people took to the streets of Tehran and other cities.But those who hoped for another popular revolution were to be disappointed. The protests were violently repressed by the Basij volunteer militia of the Revolutionary Guards. Leaders of the protests were imprisoned and, in some cases, executed. Just to be extra sure, however, Ahmadinejad threw in his media manipulation tool of choice: Iran’s nuclear programme.In October 2009 Iran, under international pressure following the exposure of a secret enrichment plant at Qom, agreed in principle to transfer most of its uranium abroad for further processing. But in subsequent months Ahmadinejad repeatedly pulled back from an agreement, seeking to rewrite the terms and flouting deadlines.In the days leading up to the 31st anniversary of the Iranian Revolution in February 2010, when widespread opposition protests were anticipated, Ahmadinejad ratcheted up international tensions. First came the announcement that Iran had successfully launched a space probe carrying two turtles, a hamster and a worm. Then its nuclear scientists announced that they would maintain their defiance of the West by going ahead with the country’s controversial uranium enrichment programme.This was followed by an announcement from the Iranian Defence Ministry that it would shortly begin production of “advanced” unmanned drones that would be capable of carrying out “assaults with high precision” against neighbouring states.President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, left, shakes hands with Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal in 2006 - AFP via GettyAhmadinejad proceeded to use the anniversary festivities as a platform to issue a succession of headline-grabbing pronouncements. “Iran is now a nuclear state”, he told a pro-government crowd, adding that it could build a nuclear bomb if it wanted to. The West, he said, was “playing games”. All this had the desired effect. Western leaders blew hot and cold and talked of sanctions, while commentators preoccupied themselves with the question of whether confrontation was now back on the agenda. Amid all the fuss the reformist protestors were largely forgotten.Ahmadinejad’s term ended in 2013 when the more moderate Hassan Rouhani was elected as his successor. Under Rouhani, Iran signed a deal to scale back its nuclear program. For his part, and despite rumours that he would stand again, Ahmadinejad was largely sidelined from Iran’s political elite, while he tried to reinvent himself as a critic of the regime.The fourth of seven children of a village blacksmith, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was born on October 28 1956 in Garmsar, 60 miles south of Tehran. In 2009 the Daily Telegraph revealed that his family had adopted the name Ahmadinejad when he was four and that he had previously been known as Sabourjian – a Jewish surname meaning cloth weaver. Experts suggested that his later penchant for hate-filled attacks on Israel could have been an ​overcompensation to hide his past.Little is known of Ahmadinejad’s early life, but in the early 1970s he came 130th in nationwide exams and won a place at Tehran’s University of Science and Technology to study engineering. Along with other university campuses all over the Islamic World, the Tehran campus was seething with political unrest. Ahmadinejad soon became active in underground, religious-based political movements.He studied hard, eventually completing a doctorate in traffic planning. When the Islamic revolution finally came in 1979, he was already a well-known figure in the Islamic Association of Students and took part in the struggle to establish the dominance of the Islamists over the leftists following the Shah’s fall. Some of the American diplomats taken hostage in the US embassy in Tehran in 1981 later testified that Ahmadinejad had been one of the hostage takers, but Ahmadinejad himself always denied being involved – as did several of the known hostage takers.Ahmadinejad, right, and Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko paying their respects at the coffin of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in Caracas, March 2013 - Miguel Angel Angul/AFP/Getty ImagesNone the less, there was no doubting​ his ideological devotion to the cause. When Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980, starting an eight-year war, Ahmadinejad left an academic career to fight and was soon at the front as a member of the Basij – the volunteer militia allied to the Revolutionary Guard. He joined a special forces unit and took part in at least one sabotage raid deep into Iraqi territory.With the war against Iraq over, in the early 1990s Ahmadinejad turned to politics. After two stints as a mayor, he became governor of Ardabil province in 1994. His new career received a temporary check three years later when a reforming moderate cleric, Mohammed Khatami, won presidential