Iranian former reformist president Mohammad Khatami is keeping mum about whether he will run again in next June”s election, despite pressure from other politicians and from friends to go for it.
At a ceremony in his home town of Yazd in central Iran on Thursday to “pay tribute to the son of the Yazd,” he carefully avoided answering questions about his intentions.
He waved to students who were shouting “Khatami, the future president,” to stop.
The former leader is seen by his friends as the only one capable of beating incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has provoked international isolation with vitriolic statements against Israel and the United States and who is widely blamed for rampant inflation which officially stands at 30 percent.
Former Irish president Mary Robinson, one of several former European leaders to attend the ceremony, appeared to endorse Khatami in comments made while she was in Yazd.
“If we had an American president open to dialogue and Khatami as Iran”s president many things would change,” Robinson said.
“This ceremony smells election campaign”, the former Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi, one of the participants in the ceremony, told AFP.
