Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was president of Iran from 2005 to 2013, and the period of his presidency is the one in which the nuclear question moved from a technical dispute to a confrontation. He was the son of a blacksmith from Aradan, took a doctorate in traffic and transport engineering, and served in the Revolutionary Guards during the war with Iraq. He was appointed mayor of Tehran in 2003 and reversed much of what his reformist predecessors had done in the city, and in 2005 he beat Rafsanjani in a run-off by campaigning as a man who lived in an ordinary house and would put the oil money on the people's tables. That promise was kept in the form of cash transfers and cheap credit, and it coincided with the highest oil prices in Iranian history, which is why his first term was popular and his second was not. He expanded uranium enrichment openly, treated the resulting sanctions as proof that the programme mattered, and combined this with speeches at the United Nations questioning the Holocaust and predicting Israel's disappearance, which cost Iran the sympathy of governments that had been willing to argue its case. His re-election in 2009 was announced within hours on a scale nobody believed, and the Green Movement that followed was the largest protest since the revolution and was put down with beatings, mass arrests and the deaths of demonstrators including Neda Agha-Soltan. By the end of his second term he had quarrelled with Khamenei himself over the appointment of ministers, and the establishment that had protected him in 2009 turned on him. He was barred from standing again in 2017 and 2021 by the Guardian Council, and has spent the years since as a critic of the system he once personified, which is a position with no constituency in Iran. His government also removed the state subsidies on fuel and bread and replaced them with direct payments, a reform economists had urged for decades and which inflation then swallowed. The rial lost roughly two-thirds of its value between 2011 and 2013 as the banking sanctions took hold. He handed a badly damaged economy to Hassan Rouhani, who was elected on the promise of getting the sanctions lifted.

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