Ahmadinejad's Conservative Critics

Another name I've been keeping an eye out for has surfaced. This time it's Ahmad Tavakkoli, who ran for the presidency against Rafsanjani and 1993 and Khatami in 2001 and is close to (in fact, related by marriage, if I remember correctly) Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani. He is unhappy with the crackdown:

"Many prominent conservative politicians, including Ahmad Tavakkoli, a conservative critic of Mr Ahmadinejad and head of the parliament research centre, and Maryam Behrouzi, secretary general of the Zeynab Association – a politically conservative women’s group – have also protested over Mr Ahmadinejad’s attitude towards his opponents.

"In a live programme on the state-run television on Wednesday, Mr Tavakkoli said Mr Ahmadinejad’s tone was one of the main reasons for the present unrest in the country.

"'The 14 million who didn’t vote for Ahmadinejad and now have questions and feel insulted, rightly or wrongly, are not ‘motes and dust’ and ‘hooligans’. Motes and dust and hooligans are those who attacked university dormitories and students and committed those murders,' Mr Tavakkoli said."

Yesterday, I wondered what Larijani was up to with his criticism of Ahmadinejad's Interior Ministry. Now I wonder if Tavakkoli is up to the same thing. Meanwhile, however, other Ahmadinejad backers are also speaking up:

"But the strongest criticism came from unexpected quarters – from a member of one the parties that had officially backed Mr Ahmadinejad’s candidacy in the elections.

"'A person who thinks of only himself and his associates as being right and all others as wrong, and looks at others as ‘motes and dust’, whatever his position, has ceased to be a servant of God,' Habibollah Asgaroladi, a prominent conservative politician, was quoted as saying by Farda News on Wednesday.

"The Islamic Coalition Party (Motalefeh), of which Mr Asgaroladi is a central council member, still considers Mr Ahmadinejad to be the winner of the elections."

The conservatives who dominate the government definitely aren't all on the same page.

(Crossposted to American Footprints)