Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was responsible for bringing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to the presidency in 2005 and paid a hefty price for keeping him in that job in 2009. These days, however, the Supreme Leader has chosen to make the president a scapegoat for Iran’s deepening political and economic crisis.
While Khamenei is the ultimate decision-maker in the Islamic Republic, he hopes to avoid accountability for the regime’s failed policies. In the wake of the protests that followed the disputed 2009 vote, the Supreme Leader stood firmly behind Ahmadinejad, primarily to ensure the marginalization of reformists and long-standing icons such as former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. Now that the power and influence of the first generation of revolutionary leaders has waned, Khamenei’s sole use for Ahmadinejad is to pin the entirety of social and economic woes on him.