Political Lines Blurred for Iran Vote

Conservative Presidential Candidates Play to an Electorate Gone Liberal

TEHRAN, June 15 -- In a profound departure from a quarter-century of politics grounded in appeals to religious duty, the presidential campaigns unfolding across Iran's capital betray not the slightest suggestion that this is a theocratic state.

Hard-line conservatives are running as reformers. Reformers, after years of being thwarted by hard-liners, are running scared. And most ordinary Iranians are holding themselves aloof -- unmoved, they say, by a political transformation that many dismiss as largely cosmetic.

"They are playing us for fools," said Aliakbar Afkari, 50, a civil servant who, like the vast majority of several dozen Tehran residents interviewed over the past two weeks, said he would not vote in Friday's election.

"By not voting," said Akbar Ehsani, 28, "I am voting against the system."

The campaign underscores how dramatically political life inside Iran has changed in recent years. While small cadres of loyalists still dutifully chant "Death to America" at state gatherings (and collect the free meals and transport that follow), the critical mass of Iran's 70 million people has grown steadily more alienated from the government and, recently, from stumbling efforts to change it.

The eight presidential hopefuls were selected by the self-appointed clerics who hold ultimate power in the country. Conservative candidates predominate in numbers and fervor, with four drawn from the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which remains deeply committed to keeping power in the hands of unelected clerics.

But as presented on billboards, trinkets, Web sites and polished television specials copied to video CDs, the candidates' glossy campaigns reflect acute sensitivity to the needs of the people, especially the young who, in a country where the voting age is 15, dominate Iran's emerging politics.

Candidates are calling for respect for personal privacy, job creation and renewed relations with the United States -- all concerns long championed by Iran's reformers, who dominated national elections until the clerical establishment removed most of them from the ballot last month.

"New Thoughts, New Government," promise the posters for Mohsen Rezai, a longtime head of the Revolutionary Guard who withdrew from the election Wednesday to avoid splintering the hard-line vote.

"Fresh Air," the slogan adopted by Ali Larijani, head of state television and radio, is a phrase made famous by a poet known for opposing the dour orthodoxy that official media relentlessly promoted.

The soft-focus ads of Mohammad Qalibaf, a former national police chief and another Revolutionary Guard command veteran, feature smiling children, flamingos in flight and the unlikely label, "Fundamentalist Reformist."

But for reinvention, no candidate has outdone Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who polls show to be the favorite. A president twice over and the current head of the Expediency Council -- a body that intervenes in deadlocks between parliament and a top clerical panel -- Rafsanjani has been a pillar of the clerical establishment since the 1979 revolution that ousted the shah and installed religious rule.