Over the last fortnight, speculation that the future of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s President, may be less than rosy has intensified. It now seems likely that his immediate predecessor, the (supposedly) reform-minded Mohammad Khatami, will be a candidate in the Presidential elections scheduled for June 2009.

When Khatami left office in 2005, he communicated the impression that he had also left politics. Now, apparently, he has undergone a change of heart. The Economist explains why:

Elected on a platform of social justice, Mr Ahmadinejad has squandered Iran’s huge oil revenues on inflationary handouts, cares little for human rights and embarrassed many of his compatriots with his undiplomatic pronouncements, among them his suggestion that Israel should not exist. Many Iranians now remember Mr Khatami’s tenure, when the authorities relaxed their grip, just a little, on the ordinary Iranian and the president won plaudits for his charm and moderation, as a golden age.

Iran’s continuing nuclear program has spurred further sanctions on an economy that has already been sharply hit by the falling price of oil. Israeli President Shimon Peres even stated that Iran’s economic crisis rendered the military option against Iran unnecessary, at least for the time being: “Iran’s leadership will also have to get up tomorrow morning and give food to their children. What will they give them? Enriched uranium?”

There would seem to be, therefore, a golden opportunity for Khatami to step in, although The Economist predicts that his will be the thankless task of pulling back the country from the brink of collapse, rather than propelling it onto an ambitious course of reform.

The weakening of Ahmadinejad is also significant for US-Iranian relations. The debate about whether the incoming Obama Administration should talk to Tehran continues, but there’s also a related debate over when to do so. Geneive Abdo observes:

At this point, it is unclear if (Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali) Khamenei will give the nod to permit the controversial Ahmadinejad to run for a second term. But if U.S.-Iran relations improve between now and the Iranian presidential election, credit is likely to fall to Ahmadinejad and his hard-line tactics, boosting his chances significantly in June. Reconciliation with Washington would vindicate Ahmadinejad, whose stinging rhetoric against the United States and Israel has caused his critics to accuse him of making Iran more of a pariah and to demand that he be denied the chance to run for reelection.

Will Khatami ride into town as the knight in shining armor? It’s certainly possible in a narrow, pragmatic sense - the combination of economic pressure and the need to make a bold gesture in Washington’s direction on the nuclear front could make him more amenable to negotiations.

Still, we should not be hasty in predicting that Iran will inevitably surrender its nuclear ambitions, for three reasons. Firstly, as both the Khatami and Ahmadinejad presidencies have demonstrated, theirs is an office with plenty of symbolic power, but limited actual power. In Iran, power resides with the Supreme Leader; factions can jockey for position, different individuals will be in or out of favor, but the fundamentally important decisions are directed by Khamenei and reinforced by the Council of Guardians which he appoints.

Secondly, it remains difficult to envisage a situation in which Iran will offer security guarantees on the nuclear front that will satisfy the US, Israel and the conservative Arab states. Here too, the record of the Supreme Leader is not encouraging.

Thirdly, is Khatami really an enlightened moderate, or is that just the shorthand interpretation? He is certainly more refined than Ahmadinejad, and more appealing in a western orientalist sense, but what of the substance? Well, on the question of Israel’s very existence, Khatami has frequently engaged in the sort of rhetoric we now associate with Ahmadinejad.

Blogger Hossein Derakhshan (whose mysterious case we have examined here and here) revisited Khatami’s record on Israel in one of his last posts before disappearing, presumably into imprisonment, in Tehran. In 1998, at the height of the peace process, Khatami called Israel “a plague” during a meeting with the late King Hussein of Jordan. In 2000, he denounced the “terrorist racist Zionist regime” at an OIC summit. Later that same year, in urging the creation of an international war crimes tribunal for Israel, he insisted that Israel’s crimes were worse than those committed in the former Yugoslavia and in Rwanda.

In the same post, Derakhshan recorded the key points of Khatami’s proposed peace plan:

1. Return of all Palestinians to their own homeland in the occupied Palestine; 2. Holding of a democratic referendum with the participation of all original Palestinians — of Muslim, Jewish or Christian faith — to determine the type of their future system of governance; 3. Establishment of a democratic Palestinian state in the entire territory of Palestine with Al-Qods Al-Sharif as its capital. 4. Decision of such independent Palestinian state regarding current inhabitants of Palestine.

Look familiar? That’s because Ahmadinejad has proposed exactly the same thing.

On the nuclear issue, Khatami, like Ahmadinejad, has emphasized the supposedly “peaceful” nature of the program and pledged that Iran will never give it up. Not even in the face of UN-authorized sanctions.

It’s also important to remember that liberal Iranians were severely disappointed by Khatami as President. During a wave of repression in 2003, the philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush wrote to him as follows: “The peaceful and democratic uprising of the Iranian people against religious dictatorship in May 1997 was a sweet experience. But your failure to keep the vote and your wasting of opportunities put an end to it and disappointed the nation. Now, failures have turned into unrest.”

Five years on from Soroush’s letter, Iran faces unrest, uncertainty and very little clarity. Blind faith in Khatami - the belief that he is Iran’s Gorbachev - will not alter that. Going by his past record, there is scant reason to think that he has either the power or the will to bring America’s current buzzword to the people of Iran: change.