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The long line of women decked out in black chadors wound around the side of the Jame Mosque in Narmak, president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's neighborhood in southeast Tehran. This the place where, four years ago, Ahmadinejad chose as the spot to cast his ballot, and many neighborhood residents still fiercely defend their hometown hero. "Ahmadinejad has done a good job," says Fatemeh Moussavi, a 60-year-old housewife sporting a black chador. "We want him to defend our values." As she finishes talking, Maryam, a 24-year-old housewife wearing a floral headscarf walks by, shaking her head. "These people have been fooled," she says. "Ahmadinejad plays with peoples' emotions. Can the current situation get any worse than it is? If there's no cheating, [Mir Hossein] Mousavi will win."
This rivalry between the two top candidates played out across the country in what appears to be the highest turnout yet for a presidential election in Iran. Voters arrived at polling stations in Tehran hours before they opened this morning and sometimes waited in long lines, more than three hours at one site, under a blistering summer sun. The massive crowds turned out in the working-class southern neighborhoods of Tehran as well as the tony northern hills. Extra ballot boxes were brought to many polling sites to reduce the wait time. Many observers had predicted a high turnout based on the huge street rallies to support the candidates in the past week. "A high turnout will not work in Ahmadinejad's favor," says Hamid Reza Jalaipour, a political analyst and professor at Tehran University. Late on Friday night, Mousavi held a raucous press conference to declare victory and complain of widespread irregularities; at about the same time, Ahmadinejad claimed victory on his Web site. The official results won't be released until Saturday morning in Iran.
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Despite a ban on campaign advertising, many Mousavi supporters wore green shirts, scarves or wristbands, the campaign's color, to the polling sites. At one site this afternoon, voters holding Mousavi buttons flashed peace signs to passing cars. Text-messaging on cell phones was cut off unexpectedly today, which, Mousavi's campaign workers say, hampered their efforts to keep in touch with their election monitors. There were much more serious transgressions later in the day. At approximately 7 p.m., one of Mousavi's campaign offices in north Tehran was attacked by half a dozen plainclothes men, who, according to a source at the office, were carrying official IDs. When workers at the office confronted the men, they threw out canisters of pepper spray or tear gas. A scuffle ensued and the men were eventually detained and handed over to police.
Many of the voters Friday agreed on a handful of points: inflation needs to be reduced and unemployment needs to be dealt with. But there was a wide gap between Mousavi and Ahmadinejad supporters on a host of other issues like foreign policy and social freedom. "The most important thing in this election is our foreign policy," says Mohsen Mahmoudi, a 34-year-old cleric in a white turban and brown robe at the Husseiniya Ershad polling site in central Tehran. "We've always had some problems inside the country. But it's very important that the world's view of Iran changes." At the Nabih Mosque in south Tehran, Fatemeh Sadeh, a 40-year-old Ahmadinejad supporter, had a completely different set of concerns. "We need a president who will deal with the universities and not let them do whatever they want," she says. "The men and women need to be separated in universities."
There is some debate about the power of the presidency in a system where the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, controls the military and the broadcast media and appoints the chief judge. Analysts within Iran like to say that the post is neither as weak as some made it out to be under former president Mohammad Khatami nor as strong as some have made it out to be under Ahmadinejad. "It's true that the president isn't the most important post in Iran," says a Western diplomat in Tehran, who was not authorized to speak on the record. "But it does have an effect on political life."
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