The low turnout was not the only surprise thrown up by the poll, however. For the first time since 1997, the conservatives managed to trounce the reformists. Resounding reformist victories in the 1999 local elections and a 2000 parliamentary poll came between Mohammad Khatami’s presidential landslides in May 1997 and June 2001.

Most observers saw the results of the latest municipal elections as a sign that Iran is about to witness a political earthquake that might well result in the overthrow of the reformist current and the return of the conservatives to prominence.

Khatami’s reform process is in deep crisis because of the failure of the president and his supporters to achieve fundamental reform of the Iranian political system. The reformists failed to make Iran a freer and more open society. The conservatives must shoulder part of the blame for this of course. After they secured control of the judiciary and the state’s security arms, the conservatives began persecuting liberal writers, intellectuals and academics. Some were assassinated in dubious circumstances, while many were jailed.

The conservatives appeared ready to stop at nothing in their determination to defend the essentially conservative and traditional nature of the Islamic Republic. So determined were they that the Revolutionary Guards even threatened to mount a coup against the democratically elected president unless he took steps to contain the pro-reform student rebellion of 1999. Khatami had no alternative but to acquiesce, and the student revolt was duly suppressed.

That confrontation had profound effects on Khatami’s reform process, which from then on seemed unwilling to engage the conservative’s head on. Since 1999, Khatami has tended to accommodate the conservatives, and made efforts to win the support of supreme leader Ali Khamenei for his reforms.

Continuing his conciliatory and non-confrontational course, Khatami last autumn proposed a set of reformist constitutional amendments designed to enhance the powers vested in the president and reduce those held by the conservative-controlled Council of Guardians, an unelected body with considerable power.

Under present rules, the council vets presidential and parliamentary election candidates and needs to approve parliamentary bills to become law. If rejected by the council, parliamentary bills could be sent to the Expediency Council, another conservative body that arbitrates between Parliament and the Council of Guardians. Khameneh’i, who has the final say on all state matters, handpicks six clerics of the12-member Council of Guardians and all Expediency Council members.

Khatami initially made it clear that passing these amendments was the basis for his continuing in office. But he failed to maintain the momentum; fearing a confrontation with the conservatives, he chose to shelve them.

Turnarounds like these led to the reform program losing its impetus. Khatami only has two years of his second (and last) term as president left to run, and he seems unwilling to engage in angry confrontations with the conservatives to push his reforms through.

Clearly, the president doesn’t want to go down in history as "Iran’s Gorbachev" (a reference to Mikhail Gorbachev, whose reforms led to the collapse of the Soviet regime), even if that meant betraying the trust of the Iranians who voted him to power.

The results of the latest municipal vote mirrored the extent to which Iran’s pro-reform forces have abandoned Khatami and his loyalists. In Tehran, for example, conservative candidates swept 14 of the 15 seats on the capital’s city council.

Reza Khatami ­ the president’s younger brother, who leads the pro-Khatami reformist Islamic Iran Participation Front ­ warned as far back as last Dec. 10 of the dangers of alienating Iran’s students because of the slow pace of reform, saying: "If we don’t respond to the students’ aspirations, they will lose faith in the regime. We don’t know what example they would then choose to follow."

But it seems the reformists didn’t take Reza’s warnings seriously. The result was their abysmal showing in the Feb. 28 election, followed by an announcement by Iran’s largest students organization, the Office for Strengthening Unity, of its decision to abandon the pro-Khatami camp and operate under a new name ­ the Democratic Movement.

This would deliver a crushing blow to the reformists and be a golden opportunity for the conservatives, who can mobilize their supporters to take advantage of the situation. The conservatives could then regain control of all elected bodies in Iran, which would spell disaster for reform and for "Khatamism."

Another factor expected to play into the hands of the conservatives is the imminent war on Iraq and the possibility that a pro-American regime might soon be in power in Baghdad.

This would put Iran in an extremely uncomfortable position, as it would be surrounded by the American-influenced regimes in Afghanistan to the east and Iraq to the west. Add to this the fact that President George W. Bush has already classified Iran as a member of his "axis of evil," and the fact that Washington has been targeting the Iranian nuclear program for some time, and we arrive at the conclusion that prospects for a confrontation between Iran and the US would increase considerably after the Americans invade Iraq.

This would strengthen the position of the conservatives, who would then be able to mobilize the Iranian masses against "the imperialist American threat."

By contrast, the position of the reformists, who have been calling on the country to open up to the West, would be weakened.

Editor’s note: Abdelmalik Salman is an Egyptian political analyst who heads the Studies and Research Department at the Bahrain daily Akhbar al-Khaleej. The Beirut-based The Daily Star published this article on 19 March issue.