Khatami's mandate

Yet the reaction of many pro-reformists within Iran and abroad has been far from joyful. The brooding presence of the regime's powerful "conservatives," who did so much to try to stifle opposition during Khatami's first term, provided a powerful dampener. Even one of the president's closest advisers predicted that the honeymoon would be short, and said that Khatami's enemies would soon be back to taunt him. "Maybe two months," said Ataollah Mohajerani, the former Islamic guidance minister. "Then they'll use different language, but they'll start repeating the same things they've done before."

Perhaps Mohajerani, squeezed out of office himself a year ago by conservatives, was being unduly pessimistic. But critics of the electoral process in Iran may argue that the system is less than totally democratic: candidates must be vetted by unelected religious authorities and many are dismissed as unIslamic; supreme power continues to reside in the person of the unelected supreme leader, Ali Khamenei; the president's room for maneuver remains constrained by powerful forces within the judiciary and other state institutions.

But conservatives of various hues no longer have a mandate to oppose - let alone the prospect of a future mandate to govern. The possibilities for Khatami's opponents are limited, unless they are to risk provoking uncontrollable popular unrest. The job of preventing such a showdown belongs to Khamenei, who can be too easily dismissed as a front man for the most reactionary forces in the regime. In the four years of Khatami's first term, the supreme leader and the president played much more of a double act than either the conservatives or the secularists will admit.

Both are clergymen and products of an Islamic revolution, and it is a fair bet that neither would argue very much with the conclusion of Mostafa Hashemi-Taha, the unfortunate candidate who came last with only 0.1 percent of the vote. Despite his close links to Khamenei, Hashemi-Taha acknowledged that Khatami represented a path between two extremes. "One wants Iran like another Afghanistan," he said. "The other wants Iran like Turkey, a secular system empty of religious foundation. We oppose fanatics." He cautioned, however, that moves to push the country towards secularism would provoke a backlash that would lead to a regime worse than that in Afghanistan.

On the basis of the few votes he gathered, Hashemi-Taha's message of moderation appears to have fallen on deaf ears. His veiled warning that the clergy will not abandon the country to secularism without a fight will nevertheless have to be heeded by the secularists who support Khatami, who is unlikely to move as rapidly along the path of reform as most of his supporters would like.

The blow that the conservatives have suffered should not be underestimated. They have lost any support among the people that they may once have had and, in a youthful country, they now appear irrevocably wedded to the past. Khatami's first electoral victory could have been dismissed as a fluke or an ineffectual protest vote. This time, the electorate has given him an incontrovertible mandate for change. The conservatives will now have to consider moving towards the center. Otherwise, they risk even greater irrelevancy four years from now.

Harvey Morris in London