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Saturday, June 15, 2013

Cleric Hassan Rouhani is running away with the Iranian vote

Lefty Scotland  is jubilant that a "Glasgow man" will now be Iran's honcho.
By that same token, I bet  Big Brother too was jubilant  when Morsi  was elected as President of Egypt because he spent some years in a California university.  That makes Morsi a "California man".
Hassan Rouhani is supposed to be the most moderate and the most modern from the others who were in the running.

Fraser Nelson writing at SpectatorUK:
Iran may have just elected a Glasgow man  as president  Early results from Iran’s presidential election indicate that Hassan Rouhani, as Glasgow graduate, is in the lead. He is a cleric and a polyglot, speaking English, German, French, Russian and Arabic. He is seen as a reformer and jumping out from his long CV is a doctorate from Glasgow Caledonian University. Like most Glasgow men, he’s proud of the fact – even if his election broadcast cheekily truncated his alma matter to “Glasgow University” so it could show footage of its far-prettier campus. He was rumbled: it now looks as if he studied at the old Glasgow Polytechnic in the 1970s. But he seems to have enjoyed Glasgow so much – understandably – that he returned to study a PhD in the 1990s. (The graduation list here: he then went by the name of Hassan Feridon).
To his credit, his PhD study appears to coincide with his tenure as secretary of Iran’s supreme national security council. Now, personally, I’d rather do this job from Glasgow than Tehran. What better vantage point to view the world than the kebab houses and hostelries of Sauchiehall Street? Where better to hone skills in diplomacy? (He has been Iran’s lead nuclear negotiator). And you can’t accuse him of reveling in Western decadence – life expectancy is lower in Glasgow than in Iran.
All told, the ascendancy of this Glasgow man bodes well for Iranian politics. Those armed with a Scottish education have made excellent leaders of foreign countries. Canada had John Buchan and modern Hong Kong was pretty much invented by John Cowperthwaite who applied the ideas of Adam Smith to make this tiny island as rich (per capita) as America.....

From YahooNews ...Nasser Karimi and Brian Murphy writing at AP :
... Iran's reformist-backed presidential candidate  surged to a wide lead in a partial vote count Saturday, a top official said, suggesting a flurry of late support could have swayed a race that once appeared solidly in the hands of Tehran's ruling clerics.
The powerful showing by former nuclear negotiator Hasan Rowhani, which may be enough to give him an outright victory and avoid a two-person runoff next Friday, demonstrated the strength of opposition sentiment even in a system that is gamed against it. The ruling clerics barred from the race reform candidates seen as too prominent, allowing a list of hopefuls who were mainly staunch loyalists of the supreme leader.
But the opposition settled on Rowhani as the least objectionable of the bunch, making him the de facto reform candidate.
While Iran's presidential elections offer a window into the political pecking orders and security grip inside the country — particularly since the chaos from a disputed outcome in 2009 — they lack the drama of truly high stakes as the country's ruling clerics and their military guardians remain the ultimate powers.......

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