The authorities may succeed in quelling the street demonstrations. But the crisis is far from over, especially as the ruling clergy quarrel among themselves

Reuters

THE roller-coaster that liberal-minded Iranians boarded as they agitated en masse against a suspect presidential poll seemed to hit the buffers on June 20th, when a banned demonstration was met with lethal force. Millions of Iranians remain incensed by what they see as President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's fraudulent victory over his main challenger, the reformist Mir Hosein Mousavi, in the election of June 12th. But far fewer now seem ready to take the risk of venting their anger on the streets. For all that, it may not take much to provoke another popular eruption. A fresh spark may yet be provided by the unusually public struggle for dominance over the Islamic Republic that has erupted within the ruling clerical establishment itself. The crisis may indeed be moving from the street to the back rooms of the mosque.

Aiming for a resolution of sorts, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran's supreme leader, and the man who has the last say on all matters of state, issued a dramatic ultimatum in a sermon on June 19th. Addressing a huge television audience, he dropped his customary pose of impartiality in electoral politics, siding with Mr Ahmadinejad and warning Mr Mousavi's supporters that further street protests would lead to “violence, blood and chaos.”

To the surprise of many Iranians, who do not as a rule associate reformist leaders with political courage, Mr Mousavi refused to call off a demonstration that had been planned for the next day, nor did he retract his demand that the results be annulled and the election held again. But the result was a pitifully unequal struggle between demonstrators hurling stones and tens of thousands of Revolutionary Guards and voluntary militiamen, known as the baseej, armed with truncheons, water-cannon and automatic rifles.

According to state-controlled media, a score of people have been killed. Other reports put the figure much higher, and say that several hundred have been injured. The government said that 40 brave baseej had been hurt. Some residential areas in central Tehran resembled war zones. The protesters have exalted the image of a beautiful young woman, Neda Agha Soltan, who was photographed in a demonstration in Tehran as she lay dying after being shot by an unknown assailant.

An edgy calm has now descended on the city. Protests in Tehran and other towns, such as Isfahan, Kerman, Shiraz and Tabriz, which witnessed huge displays of public dissent after the election result was announced, have since got smaller, letting the authorities tackle the people they regard as instigators of the troubles.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a New York-based lobby, more than 40 journalists have been arrested since the elections and at least 450 political campaigners imprisoned, severely limiting the ability of Mr Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, the lesser of the two reformist presidential candidates, who is also demanding fresh elections, to plan their next move or even communicate with their supporters. Several senior colleagues of Muhammad Khatami, a reformist former president, have been arrested, along with at least a dozen journalists close to Mr Mousavi's campaign, according to a website that is tracking events.

Fearing a backlash, the authorities have so far refrained from arresting Mr Moussavi or Mr Karroubi. But they are laying the ground. Mr Mousavi has been savaged by the pro-government media and accused of helping a banned opposition group, the People's Mujahedin of Iran, which is particularly active in western Europe. On June 21st the head of parliament's judiciary committee said Mr Mousavi's public statements constituted “criminal acts”. Tehran police claim to have found evidence of co-operation between “foreign elements” and agitators operating from a building that was used by the Mousavi campaign.

Neither Mr Mousavi nor Mr Karroubi had much faith in the willingness of the Guardian Council, a watchdog body itself watched over by Mr Khamenei, to investigate fairly their allegations that Mr Ahmadinejad owed his landslide victory to fraud. According to the Interior Ministry, the incumbent won 25m votes out of 39m cast, compared with 13m for Mr Mousavi and a risible 300,000 for Mr Karroubi, a former speaker of parliament. Scepticism is understandable: the council is in overall charge of running the elections, which means that it has been investigating itself.

Mr Mousavi says that the election was perverted by a multitude of procedural irregularities and by restrictions placed on his representatives' legal right to monitor ballot boxes. These allegations, which he put in writing, have had little effect. On June 21st a spokesman for the Guardian Council announced that in 50 towns the number of ballots cast had exceeded the number of eligible voters. But it was possible, he went on, that many people had voted outside their home towns.

The council may be preparing for a modest revision of the results, giving Mr Mousavi a few more votes, probably in a few days' time. But annulment, as Mr Khamenei made clear in his sermon, when he denied that the Islamic Republic “goes in for betrayal in the matter of the people's votes”, seems out of the question.

Permitted little contact with their supporters, their precise whereabouts a matter of intense public speculation, Messrs Mousavi and Karroubi have managed at least to unnerve their opponents with their refusal to give up. Mr Mousavi has described defenders of Mr Ahmadinejad as “the proponents of a petrified, Taliban-style Islam” and has dismissed the idea, first expressed by the supreme leader, that the agitation was driven by foreign enemies. On June 24th Mr Karroubi defied a government ban by holding a wake for those who were killed in the violence four days earlier. But it was violently broken up.

The real new fight is less visible

So the battle for the streets may inevitably be heading for victory for Mr Ahmadinejad and the ruling clerical establishment behind him. But a titanic struggle behind the scenes, obscured by public events and often blurred by Tehran's whirring rumour mill, may be just as crucial to the country's future. This pits Mr Khamenei against a wily former president who until recently was often regarded as the Islamic Republic's second-most-powerful man, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

On the face of it, this struggle is also going the supreme leader's way, as you would expect, since between them Mr Khamenei and his president hold the main levers of civilian and military power. Mr Rafsanjani's long silence since the election suggests he has been disheartened by the verbal attacks on him and by the arrest of several family members, including his daughter, a former parliamentary deputy, who has since been released. Mr Ahmadinejad has made no secret that he longs to see Mr Rafsanjani and members of his family charged with corruption.

So complete is Mr Rafsanjani's eclipse, at any rate for the time being, that information on his movements and intentions now consists of hearsay. According to one account, he has been busy in the seminary town of Qom, canvassing senior clerics to back a move to sack Mr Khamenei. Another suggests he may signal his surrender to the inevitable by attending Friday's prayers, whereas he was conspicuously absent when Mr Khamenei gave his sermon on June 19th.

In jail or at home, Iran's reformists must be rueing their mistakes. It was Mr Rafsanjani, after all, who helped manoeuvre his old friend Mr Khamenei into the vacant supreme leader's chair after the death of the revolution's father, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, 20 years ago. To that end, Mr Rafsanjani helped ensure the eclipse of Ayatollah Hosein Ali Montazeri, who had been Khomeini's heir apparent and who now, a fragile octogenarian, sends messages in support of Mr Mousavi's cause. Later, during the presidency of Mr Khatami (1997-2005), reform-minded Iranians turned on Mr Rafsanjani with such venom that he failed even to win a seat in parliament in the elections of 2000.

Have the liberals lost?

The price of those misjudgments and divisions will be high. Ever since the Islamic Republic was set up after the revolution of 1979, revolutionary purists have had to tolerate another faction, culturally more liberal and latterly more open to relations with the West. This lot is now being squelched.

Reuters

Khamenei ponders his supremacy

At what cost to Iran's already tarnished image abroad? Thanks to their mobile telephones, the protesters have beamed the most gruesome images around the world. France's president, Nicolas Sarkozy, says the “repression and violence” is “unacceptable”. Germany's chancellor, Angela Merkel, has expressed support for “the people in Iran who want to exercise their right to freedom of expression and freedom of assembly.” Barack Obama, who had at first tried to stay aloof so as not to endanger his policy of detente with Iran, declared that he was “appalled and outraged…by the threats, beatings and imprisonments” being meted out. The protesters, he said, were “on the right side of history”.

For the many people in Tehran who had hoped that Mr Obama would help usher in a bright new chapter in relations between Iran and the West, this is depressing. Western criticism has bolstered those in Tehran whose instinct, at the first sign of trouble at home, is to seek foreign scapegoats. At the top of the list comes Iran's favourite bugbear, Britain.

Taking their cue from Mr Khamenei, who described Britain as “abhorrent” in his sermon, Iranian officials have accused Britain's government of sinister manipulation of events. Manuchehr Mottaki, Iran's foreign minister, described in outlandish detail how Britain had flown in planeloads of spies (he did not explain how they had cleared immigration); he then expelled a brace of British diplomats. Iran's foreign-ministry spokesman has depicted two foreign-based satellite television channels, BBC Persian and the Voice of America, which have been transmitting images and comment to viewers in Iran, as part of an Israeli conspiracy to break the country up.

America's choice

Mr Obama must now decide whether to let all this affect his efforts to engage Iran. His aim is to persuade the country to forgo its contentious nuclear plan—or at least to modify it and throw it open to scrutiny. Plainly, Israel's hawkish prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, senses a chance to help kibosh an American diplomatic initiative that discomfited him from the start.

Some Iranians who cheered Mr Obama's policy of engagement may have changed their minds. Shirin Ebadi, a Nobel peace-prize laureate who is Iran's best-known human-rights campaigner, has asked the European Union to freeze all political dialogue with Iran “until the violence stops and fresh elections are held.” But Russia, which Mr Obama had hoped to draw into a coalition of countries tugging Iran towards respectability, is being awkwardly indulgent of Iran's behaviour, with a foreign ministry spokesman calling the crisis an “internal affair”. More predictably China has endorsed the election.

Unless Mr Khamenei dramatically changes heart or protests resume on an irresistible scale, reform-minded Iranians may again have to resign themselves to living without the limited democratic freedoms, including the right to elect a president from an albeit vetted field, that they had hoped to build on. A political elite shorn of its reformist element may well bolster the authoritarian and militarist ways that Iranians are already seeing in embryo: baseej militiamen on every street corner; a special court that is being set up to try arrested “hooligans”; and senior military people muttering darkly about foreign threats.

In the longer term, however, many Iranian liberals think Mr Obama's optimism will be vindicated. The election campaign and the protests that followed have permitted Iranians to express themselves with a freedom they have not known since the revolution of 1979. They enjoyed the experience—and want more. Further, the sight of infighting among leaders who were apparently united under the binding influence of Ayatollah Khomeini, has undermined the Islamic Republic's claim to legitimacy, and still more its claim to sanctity. “That idol has been smashed,” said a commentator in Tehran.

In any event, Mr Mousavi's campaign is going on. If he is arrested, his supporters say they will call a general strike. At night, people around the country gather on their rooftops to shout “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is Great!”), a call dating back to the 1979 revolution that Mr Mousavi's people have made their own. And many Iranians will fondly recall the post-election march on June 15th that as many as 2m people attended. It was impeccably well-behaved, good-humoured and entirely self-policed.

In the words of one Iranian who attended, “Before then I had lost my faith in being Iranian. We were becoming selfish, turning in on ourselves. But that march seemed to change everything. It can't have been a dream—can it?”