Sounding a Death Knell for Reform: With Tensions Running High between Tehran and the West, Angus McDowall Looks Back on Four Years That Have Seen the Demise of the Reformist Movement, the Rise of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and a Growing Risk of War

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Four years ago in Tehran, in March 2003, the promise of reform was still in the air. People were voicing opinions in public and in the press they could not have imagined revealing a few years earlier.

Codes of dress and behaviour were relaxing, the economy was opening up and there was talk of a rapprochement or some form of grand bargain with the US. Government ministers talked interminably about the dialogue of civilisations and civil society.

But the movement was already on the ropes. It had just suffered its first electoral defeat in countrywide polls for city councils. A conservative and relative political outsider called Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had in turn been selected as the capital's mayor, and liberals were scared he would cut funding for civil society projects. They were pessimistic about Majlis (parliament) elections in 2004 and a presidential vote in 2005. …