Rivals unite against hardline mayor's presidential ambition

AS MAYOR of Tehran he has shut down fast food restaurants, forced male and female council workers to use separate lifts, and even banned adverts featuring David Beckham.

Now, after two years of using city hall to wage war on Iran's reformers and liberals, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be about to take his ultra-conservative politics to the world stage.

To the dismay of modernisers within the Islamic republic - and even some conservatives - the hardline, but previously small-time apparatchik is now a possible future leader after doing surprisingly well in last week's presidential elections.

Most alarming of all, say his opponents, is that he has only limited respect for the election that has brought him to the cusp of power, having famously remarked once that "We did not have a revolution in order to have democracy".

Originally written off as a rank outsider because of his stance at the more extreme end of Iran's religious right, he polled an unexpected 19.25 per cent of the vote, putting him in second place.

That now leaves him poised for a close tie-break vote this Friday with the man previously the clear favourite, the more moderate conservative Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who polled 21.1 per cent.

A triumph for Mr Ahmadinejad in the run-off, critics say, would hand power firmly back to Iran's mullahs and threaten to turn the political clock back decades: not just on Iran's tentative programme of domestic reforms, but also its slowly-thawing relations with the outside world.

Unlike other presidential candidates, Mr Ahmadinejad, a former student radical who helped plan the storming of the United States embassy after Iran's 1979 revolution, has no particular enthusiasm for re-establishing ties with the US.

Nor has he shown interest in dialogue over Iran's controversial nuclear programme, which he has accused "arrogant" Western nations of interfering with.

Such is the alarm at the prospect of an Ahmadinejad presidency that his political rivals have now decided to bury their differences to try and secure his defeat in the run-off.

Mr Ahmadinejad's success also led to claims of foul play. Yesterday, Iran's election chiefs ordered a selective vote recount, following complaints that the polls were rigged by his allies.