COLIN FREEMAN
IN TEHRAN
WITH his cheap open-necked suits, 18-hour working days and ever-ready quotes from the Koran, he is the very model of Islamic piety. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the ultra hardliner who swept to power as Iran's new president yesterday, is modest about everything - except, perhaps, his own modesty.
Even as he cast his ballot in the poll that propelled him to victory on Friday, the former mayor of Tehran could not resist another chance to portray himself as just a humble workman. "I take pride in being the Iranian nation's little servant and street sweeper," he said.
Yet for his reformist opponents, the real worry now is that he will sweep away much more than just rubbish. They fear that Ahmadinejad - a former revolutionary dubbed Iran's answer to the Taliban - will banish what few social freedoms Iranians have won in the last decade, bringing back the kind of religious orthodoxy not seen since the country's 1979 Islamic revolution.
In the affluent suburbs of northern Tehran anecdotes were circulating last night about his conservative vision for the future. One tells how, as mayor, he banned street adverts featuring David Beckham, while another says he ordered male council officials to wear beards and long sleeves.
Outside Iran, meanwhile, the fear is that Ahmadinejad's Islamism will extend beyond killjoy puritanism. Widely considered the mouthpiece of the country's all-powerful mullahs, he threatens to usher in a new era of confrontational relations with the West.
Unlike nearly all his rivals, who promised rapprochement with the West, he has made no secret of his desire for Iran to continue with its nuclear programme - and of his disdain for US and European attempts to stop them. "The US administration cut off ties unilaterally to lay waste to the Islamic republic," he said. "They want to restore them today for the same reason." He is now expected to put future talks on Iran's nuclear project into the hands of avowed anti-Western clerics.
So why, after eight years of a government which has pushed as much as it could for Western-style reforms, have Iranians elected to turn the political clock back toward its revolutionary heyday? If allegations are to be believed, it is because of widespread vote-rigging among his allies in Iran's Revolutionary Guards and religious militias, who are also accused of intimidating voters at some polling stations.
But the size of his majority, which has alarmed and surprised foreign diplomats, suggests otherwise. Originally written off as a rank outsider, Ahmadinejad ended up with 62.2 % of the vote, nearly twice the 35.3 % tally of his rival, the reform-minded cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Instead, the reason for his success appears to be a growing disillusionment among poorer Iranians with reforms over the past decade by his predecessor, Mohammad Khatami.
In the vast, Soviet-style public housing blocks of southern Tehran, and the country's poor rural areas, reformist promises of greater political freedoms are dismissed as the obsessions of an out-of-touch elite. By contrast, Ahmadinejad's urge for a return to the values of the Islamic revolution - fondly, if selectively, remembered as a time of self-sacrifice and community spirit - strike an immediate chord.
Nowhere is that truer than in the farming hamlet of Aradan, 60 miles southeast of Tehran, where the country's new leader was born in 1956. The mud-built house that he lived in is now a litter-strewn hovel, but fellow neighbours now expect great things of the village's most famous son.
"This country has great wealth but it lies in the hands of a few. Only Ahmadinejad can disperse it," said his cousin Mohammad Reza Mohseni.
In the conservative city of Qom, where women still dress in the head-to-toe black chador cloak, the enthusiasm for his avowed probity illustrates the yawning social gulf that modernisation has thrown up.
"Women are allowing their hair to show, wearing slim coats, short trousers or scarves instead of the veil," said Fatemeh Khorosani, 40. "The blood of the martyrs is sullied by this behaviour."
Taghi Davoud Abadi, 47, who decked his cafe out with Ahmadinejad posters, added: "We have lost half of the values of the Islamic revolution. Ahmadinejad needs to win back the ground. We must not accept a Western cultural invasion."
Despite being a relative youngster in Iranian political circles, Ahmadinejad, 49, has impeccable credentials, being a scion of the Islamic revolution that toppled Iran's pro-Western monarch, the Shah, in 1979. He was among the students who helped plan the taking of hostages at the US embassy that year, and then served as a special forces soldier during the Iran-Iraq war and as an instructor in the Basij, the thuggish clerical militia that enforces religious observance.
He then moved into politics, serving with distinction as a provincial governor before being elected as Tehran's mayor two years ago. It is his stints as a can-do technocrat that have impressed voters most: his campaign video plays on his image as honest servant of the people, fighting Iran's corrupt bureaucracy to get roads, houses and schools built, and relaxing by reading the Koran in his modest home.
In many ways his message echoes that of his revolutionary mentor, Ayatollah Khomeini. He has promised Iran's underclass higher wages, more development funds and a better share of the country's vast oil wealth. "What we need is justice," he says. "We ask officials: 'Why are you living in palaces?'"
He says that claims he will follow extremist elements of Khomeini's rule, such as reintroducing the chador are "rumours", as is talk of banning the internet.
However, he has made no secret of his contempt for much of his immediate predecessor's record. He has complained of an "organised promotion of decadence" and says freedom in Iran "is already beyond what could be imagined".
The question now is whether his policies will match his rhetoric. Despite their popular mandate, elected Iranian politicians still have relatively little power compared with the guardian's council and the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini, who managed to water down most of President Khatami's ambitious reforms.
Iran's business community is also hostile to his talk of harnessing their wealth for the national good. Promises to "cut the hands off" Iran's oil "mafias" and rein in private banks could spark a capital flight that might undermine his plans to slash Iran's 30% unemployment.
Ironically for opponents, the main ray of hope now is that his rule precipitates a crisis which, finally, will give Iran's long-fractured reformist movement the unity to end the theocracy's stranglehold altogether.
"Ahmadinejad is a shortcut for the opposition and a move toward the revolution," said Roozbeh Farahanipour, a US-based opposition activist. "I hope that this is the last president of the Islamic Republic."
Such hopes - or fears - were addressed indirectly by Ahmadinejad yesterday. As he delivered his victory speech, he said: "Let's convert competition to friendship. We are all a nation and a big family."
Whether all of that family will tolerate the street sweeper as its head, however, remains to be seen.