Khamenei faces threat of Rafsanjani and Mashaie

DUBAI - After the huge protests that followed the 2009 election, Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may have hoped June polls would quietly install a loyal conservative president, but the surprise candidacies of two major independents may scupper that.

Both Esfandiar Rahim Mashaie, the nationalist protégé of rabble-rousing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president and Iran's best known political grandee, are seen as a threat to the leader's authority.

Khamenei personally intervened to block Mashaie becoming vice-president in 2009 - such was his disapproval of a man conservatives accuse of leading a "deviant current" within Islam that seeks to undermine the power of Muslim clerics.

Meanwhile, the supreme leader's rivalry with Rafsanjani, a seasoned political operator, goes back decades.

Little can be predicted at this stage but if Mashaie makes it through the vetting process, the election on June 14 could turn into a three-horse race between him, Rafsanjani and one of several "Principlist" candidates - those who are fiercely loyal to Khamenei and the principles of the Islamic Republic.

Even if they fail to win, big-name alternative candidates could attract greater public interest in the election, making Khamenei's plan to see an obedient conservative take office a great deal more difficult, despite his ultimate power and the Revolutionary Guards who back him.

Struggling with sanctions over its disputed nuclear program and embroiled in civil war in Syria, one of its few and closest allies, Iran's leadership must be keen to show the world it has a strong, harmonious, fully functioning political system.

Instead, the race may produce drama and perhaps the unexpected.

The contest not only reprises Rafsanjani's fight with Ahmadinejad's camp, which beat him to the presidency in 2005,but also brings into focus his troubled relationship with Khamenei, which disintegrated over his support for the defeated reformist opposition in 2009.

"Rafsanjani poses a challenge. He has said he wants to save the Islamic Republic by changing the hardline direction the country has taken in the past few years," said Farideh Farhi, an Iran analyst at the University of Hawaii.    

"Principlists who have not been able to come up with a candidate that brings together all their competing wings will have to scramble in search of some sort of unity," she said.