WASHINGTON - The massive election defeat of the former president of Iran and one of the pillars of the Islamic Republic, Hashemi Rafsanjani, by the little-known mayor of Tehran has stunned many Iranians and the international community.
It has spurred fears that Iran will return to the repressive and religiously based social policies of the early years of the 1979 revolution and embark on a more confrontational and adventurous foreign policy, thus probably hastening a serious crisis between Iran and the West.
But are these fears justified?
Or will President-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, despite his revolutionary past and hard-line reputation, have to take into account Iran's changed social, political and cultural conditions in determining his social policies and to adjust his foreign policy to the new international and regional realities?
While some hardening of positions on the domestic and international fronts is to be expected, a return to what an editorial in the Financial Times called "The Islamist Winter" is unlikely.
It's true that Mr. Ahmadinejad beat Mr. Rafsanjani by a wide margin. But he won only 19 percent of the votes in the first round while the combined votes cast for the reformist and moderate conservative candidates were nearly 55 percent. To this must be added those who did not vote as being unfavorable to Mr. Ahmadinejad.
In short, Mr. Ahmadinejad's victory was more the result of the disarray in the reformist moderate camp, some of the strong negatives of Mr. Rafsanjani and the half-hearted support of the reformists for Mr. Rafsanjani during the second round rather than a massive shift of Iranians to hard-line conservatism.
This reality means that for Mr. Ahmadinejad to govern effectively and to prevent excessive apathy or, worse, protest by the Iranians, especially among the youth, he must take the preferences and concerns of this large part of the electorate into account, at least to some degree.
This means he must avoid the social excesses of the early years of the revolution. He seems aware of these limits. For example, in his campaign, Mr. Ahmadinejad did not emphasize religious themes too much, focusing instead on improving living conditions for the poor, fighting corruption and restoring Iran's national pride.
