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If Khatami has his way, more than the tone will change. Since taking office a year ago, he has moved cautiously to create a multiparty political system and dilute the power of the Council of Guardians, a 12-member body, controlled by the Supreme Leader, that has helped entrench conservative domination. Khatami's objectives are to capture control of the Parliament in elections set for the year 2000 and win a second four-year term as President in 2001.
The mullahs have no intention of letting that happen. Hard-liners told TIME their strategy is to ignore Khatami's overwhelming popular mandate, frustrate his political reforms and then make election hay out of Khatami's handling of economic matters. They calculate that no matter what Khatami does, with the price of oil dropping, Iran's petroleum-based economy is unlikely to rebound quickly from a sluggish 0.5% growth rate and a 9% unemployment rate. And thus far, Khatami and his advisers have evinced no ability to reform the corrupt and patronage-heavy economic machinery of the country. "Being the incumbent can be a liability," smiles conservative member of Parliament Mohammed Javad Larijani. "We don't plan on giving anybody a free ride."
The latest move by the hard-liners came last week, when the Iranian Parliament voted to remove Interior Minister Abdollah Nouri. The hard-liners complained that he had stoked tensions by authorizing protest demonstrations. But they also objected to Nouri's moves to replace conservatives with moderates in key ministry posts.
Perhaps not coincidentally, the move came three months prior to elections, when Iranians will choose a new 83-member Council of Experts, the body with the power to appoint and remove a Supreme Leader. Khamenei, 59, who succeeded Khomeini as spiritual chief in 1989, has been suffering from an undisclosed ailment. Election maneuvering seems to explain, at least partly, the corruption trial of another Khatami ally, popular Tehran Mayor Gholamhossein Karabaschi. The President was counting on him to help deliver a parliamentary majority in two years.
For many Iranians, the most discouraging blow to Khatami's efforts came two weeks ago, when a conservative-controlled court ordered the closure of Jameyeh, the four-month-old pro-Khatami newspaper. When news of its shutdown spread, a Khatami deputy minister rushed to visit the editors afterward, but there was little he could offer except sympathy.
Those around the President fear that someday the hard-liners may resort to extremes, including an outright putsch, to block democratization. That could trigger a return to the factional bloodletting that left Iran in chaos in the revolution's early days. Already conservatives have sent bearded thugs from Ansar Hizballahi, a militant fundamentalist group, to break up student demonstrations authorized by Khatami's Interior Ministry.
Considering the dangers, Iranians are disappointed but not surprised that Khatami moves so gingerly. "We are waiting for the President to react to the hard-liners, but he remains silent," says a distinguished Tehran book publisher. "We worry about losing hope. We worry about the dark shadow that may be coming."