TIMESONLINE: Political history was made last night when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s President, was forced to abandon an election rally because the crowds who gathered to hear him were too vast.
As many as 50,000 fanatical supporters of the Islamic fundamentalist President had stood jam-packed for four hours in suffocating heat inside a vast prayer hall in Tehran.
Outside, an overflow crowd almost as great blocked all access to the venue. Officials said that Mr Ahmadinejad’s vehicles spent 90 minutes trying to force their way through, without success. There was talk of him holding the rally outside, but the idea was dropped when officials warned that people would be crushed to death.
As Mr Ahmadinejad’s disappointed followers flooded on to the streets, supporters of the President’s strongest rival, the reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi, mounted their own show of might. Tens of thousands of them, all dressed in green, formed a human chain running the length of Valiasr, the thoroughfare that runs 30km (18 miles) from the north to the south of the Iranian capital.
As darkness fell last night the city was in chaos, with all traffic paralysed and rival groups rampaging through the streets in support of two leaders with radically different visions for the future of their country.
It was a highly combustible situation and testimony to the extraordinary passions and excitement generated by Friday’s election in which Mr Mousavi, a former prime minister, is fighting to become the first challenger to defeat a sitting president in the 30-year history of the Islamic Republic. Iranians say that the only other presidential election that has caused such fervour was when Mohammed Khatami was swept into power on a tide of reformist fervour in 1997.
The chasm that has opened up in Iranian society after four years of Mr Ahmadinejad’s ultra-conservative, socially repressive presidency were starkly apparent yesterday.
The President’s rally matched any that Barack Obama held last year in both size and ardour. It was attended by the deeply devout, the working poor — Iranians still consumed by revolutionary fervour. The men were bearded and draped in red, white and green Iranian flags; the women dressed in all-encompassing black chadors with their headscarves drawn tight. The sexes were segregated. >>> Martin Fletcher in Tehran | Tuesday, June 09, 2009
