Our friend Jim Hoft over at Gateway Pundit continues the amount of information building up showing that extremist Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may be running out of support at home. Prices are doubling and tripling, unemployment is even worse than it was before, and support is dwindling for him in the parliament. Is it a sign of things to come? Read on:

he government puts unemplyment at 10 per cent but economists say it could be as high as 30 per cent. The government also says inflation is 11 per cent, but experts estimate it at 30 per cent!
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According to reports published by various news agencies, the bills to impeach Mostafa Pourmohammadi (Minister of the Interior) and Mahmoud Farshidi (Minister of Education) will be introduced in Majlis on Wednesday.

Meanwhile, 50 MP????????s have signed a petition requiring President Ahmadinejad to appear in the Majlis and provide explanations to his administration????????s policies. Ahmadinejad is required to appear in the Majlis if 23 more MP????????s sign the petition. The MP????????s plan to question the president on issues such as inflation, unfulfilled campaign promises, management style, and failing to respond to Majlis????????s concerns.

A group of 150 of Iran’s 290 MPs have signed a letter criticizing Ahmadinejad’s fiscal failures. This is leading to speculation that Ahmadinejad may be impeached.

Ahmadinejad, during 2005’s presidential election, said everything that the poor and unemployed underclasses of Tehran wanted to hear. It’s easy to promise people cheaper food, cheaper housing — hell, cheaper everything! But to actually deliver on such promises, against the universal laws of supply and demand? Not to mention the law that incompetent people tend to rule incompetently? That is another story altogether, and Ahmadinejad has proven that he is an incompetent ruler.

The Economists has a smart editorial bashing the idiot.

Already cock-a-hoop over the defeat of Mr Ahmadinejad’s allies in local elections last month, his domestic critics are keen to blame him for the latest round of American sabre-rattling as well as for last month’s sanctions resolution passed against Iran in the UN Security Council. It seems that a clutch of senior figures in the regime, perhaps including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have endorsed the criticism.

???????Just when the nuclear issue was about to move away from the UN Security Council, the president’s fiery speeches have resulted in the adoption of two resolutions,??????? said Hamshahri, a popular newspaper in Tehran, the capital. Such comments mark a departure from last year, when it was deemed unwise to challenge the government’s performance on the nuclear issue.

Mr Ahmadinejad’s anti-American bluster has also been attacked in light of his recent visit to Latin America, widely viewed as ill-timed and unnecessary. A reformist daily, Etemaad-e Melli, called the Venezuelan, Ecuadorean and Nicaraguan presidents, who embraced Iran’s president, ???????left-wing friends, good for coffee-shop discussions but not for setting our security, political and economic priorities???????.

During the trip, Mr Ahmadinejad announced he would put $1 billion into an Iranian-Venezuelan fund to help countries ???????free themselves from the yoke of American imperialism???????. That sharpened the more serious criticisms he faces at home over Iran’s economic performance.

A recent statement signed by 150 members of parliament imposed conditions on the president in drawing up the budget for the next Iranian year, which starts in late March. The MPs are now calling on him to defend his record before parliament.

It would not be Mr Ahmadinejad’s first run-in with deputies who supposedly share many of his own convictions. In late 2005, conservative MPs caused a crisis by rejecting several of the president’s nominees for oil minister, the cabinet’s most important post. They have since repeatedly questioned his off-the-cuff economic style, which pleases the masses but is disliked by most economists.

A sudden decision last year to raise the minimum wage had to be reversed when it caused job losses and strikes across the country. On his weekly trips to the provinces, the president is in the habit of dishing out government largesse to petitioners for local causes. And parliament has accused the government of favouritism in giving big contracts to the Revolutionary Guards without going to tender.

This lavish and sometimes whimsical spending has pushed up inflation and made Iran more vulnerable to oil-price fluctuations. MPs are increasingly concerned, not least because they face re-election early next year and fear they will be blamed for the country’s economic woes.

The president seems to thrive on controversy. But he may be in for an unusually rough few months. Taking his cue from the supreme leader, Mr Ahmadinejad may be well advised to dampen his oratory and submit a prudent budget to parliament. But that is not his usual style.

Even in Iran, all politics are local. While foreign policy is important, in many cases does not affect the everyday lives of a country’s citizens, domestic policy does. With prices as they are, with living conditions growing so much worse for the everyday people, Ahmadinejad is losing quickly any support he has had over the past few years. It has been a chance for the traditionalists — those long-entrenched authoritarian rulers who are now less on religious zeal than they are on rhetoric and a desire for power and money — and the reformists who are looking to begin modernizing the country’s socio-political sphere to finally begin regaining their influence.

In fact, the traditionalists headed by former president Rafsanjani, as Jim Hoft pointed out, are quickly turning the tides against Ahmadinejad. It seems that they, along with reformists, will have the most power in terms of running the countries local districts as well as in choosing the next Supreme Leader. Allying at key moments will marginalize Ahmadinejad’s influence dramatically, and this looks like what is going to take place.

Radio Free Europe carries a lengthy piece in which its reporters talk to several Iranian political intellectuals, who note that the right looks like it could break into two or even three separate branches. Here are the key points:

January 15, 2007 (RFE/RL) — Iran’s conservatives regularly maintain that they are united in the broad principles they espouse; just as regularly, reformists argue that there is a persistent division on the right. Could the right-wing electoral defeat in December divide conservatives once and for all?

Iranian conservatives frequently rally around principles that include the “fundamental” values of Iran’s polity, its Islamic credentials, and the paramount position of the supreme leader, currently Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It is among the reasons they rarely refer to themselves as “conservatives,” but rather “fundamentalists” or sometimes “principled” or “value-oriented” (arzesh-gara) politicians — to highlight their concern for certain principles, not just power.

Reformists contend that there is a persistent division between more radical right-wing forces associated with President Mahmud Ahmadinejad and his allies, on one hand, and pragmatists or traditionalists associated with senior clerics like Expediency Council Chairman Ali-Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, on the other. Signs of that division include the failure to field a joint presidential candidate in 2005, and more recently, the existence of two conservative lists in the December 15 municipal elections.

Reformists say that municipal voting and balloting for the influential Assembly of Experts, a clerical body that oversees the supreme leader’s office, marked a repudiation of government radicalism and support for moderation.

Azar Mansuri, a deputy head of the reformist Islamic Iran Participation Front, was quoted by ISNA on January 6 saying that “moderate conservatives clarified their divide with radical conservatives.” She added that a “third current” of pragmatic conservatism is taking shape, and said recent elections allowed them to “clarify their frameworks”. Mansuri said that when the Ahmadinejad government came to power in 2005, “this divide in the fundamentalist faction became clearer ÄwithÅ every day.” She predicted that the rift would “continue in the future” if some “singular” conduct by radicals persisted — the latter a presumed reference to presidential tirades and confrontational discourse, as well as a purported bid by radicals to take control of all state institutions.

Mohammad Salamati — the secretary-general of the left-leaning, reformist Islamic Revolution Mojahedin Organization — said according to ISNA just a few days later that such a “third current” exists and began to take shape around the 2005 presidential election.

Three Or More…

Commentators tend to leave references to such a “current” general, rather than identify its personalities or boundaries.

But Salamati speculated that the “third current” would have to form its own political party — thus formalizing divisions within the conservative camp. “Contradictions” in the conservative camp are “essential,” he said, “and cannot be resolved easily.” Salamati went on to claim that “the faction known as ‘fundamentalist’ is not united…and ÄthatÅ there are at least three political groups in that current” with each “going its own way” with its own “material and organizational interests.”

Right-wing journalist Masud Dehnamaki warned in statements quoted by ISNA on January 9 that four broad “currents” could emerge if the political right fails to unite. He described them as a reformist front; traditionalist conservatives; what he called a “new fundamentalist current” associated with Tehran’s mayor, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, and the secretary of the Expediency Council, Mohsen Rezai; and, finally, supporters of President Ahmadinejad and his government. He predicted Ahmadinejad supporters would suffer if they moved away from the conservative mainstream.

Politically, it appears as if Ahmadinejad will become isolated over the next few months unless he is able to cow he own self-involved personality. He would have to stop berating the West, stop sending billions of dollars abroad in order to buy political support, and finally focus on improving the conditions in his own country. This is a very doubtful scenario.

Yet this is Iran. It is not a democracy, so public and even rival factional opinion may not matter much. Ahmadinejad has spent the past year-and-a-half quickly consolidating the security forces under his control. The Basij militia and the Revolutionary Guards are stronger than ever and owe this in their loyalty to him. If Ahmadinejad becomes isolated, he may seek to hold onto power by force.

There are only two scenarios that the traditionalists and the reformists would be able to work out if this happens. They will oppose him undoubtedly. The first scenario would be the lucky one for them — they isolate Ahmadinejad, retake control of the government because the public no longer supports him and because they have the power to do so, or the more interesting one where Ahmadinejad holds onto power through the security forces. In this scenario, the wealthier traditionalists would align with the reformists in order to fund and organize a people’s revolution against Ahmadinejad’s one-man show. Either situation would usher in a new era for Iran, a way forward to modernity without the extremism that Ahmadinejad espouses. But perhaps the latter may have a different result. It could mean the end of the Islamic Republic as an idea altogether. With the defeat of Iran’s most extremist elements, a more secular and democratic government would be possible.

How hard the Iranian people and Ahmadinejad’s rivals desire to fight against him will determine just how far this can go. If the reformists can gain significant influence in directing such action, perhaps a confrontation between the West and Iran will never be necessary. Iran’s people have shown that they are sick of what their leaders have imposed on them. Translating this into parallel action on their part would mean wonders for democracy there.