Ahmadinejad's election as president in 2005 owed more to the organisational capabilities of the Revolutionary Guards than his own popularity. From the late 1990s onwards, the Guards had used the same tactics they had developed during the 1979 revolution to crush any hint of popular uprising against the Islamic dictatorship Khomeini had established. In 2003 when, encouraged by the presence of pro-democracy coalition forces in neighbouring Iraq, thousands of young Iranians took to the streets to demonstrate in favour of a more liberal system of government, the Guards took to the streets and brutally repressed the protesters' pro-democracy calls. The club-wielding guards stormed the student dormitories at Tehran University and subjected the demonstrators to savage beatings. After three days of pitched battles, Iran's pro-democracy genie had been well and truly put back in its bottle.

In retrospect, the regime's successful repression of the 2003 pro-democracy demonstrations was a turning point in Iran's post-revolution political development, as the conservative hardliners around Khamenei, the supreme leader, realised that their superior organisational network, allied to the Guards' brute force, could easily deal with any challenge the pro-democracy campaigners could mount. On the back of this, the hardliners set about making sure that Iran's disparate coalition of reformers and liberals would no longer be able to use the nation's democratic institutions as a platform to propagate their views.

Consequently, prior to the 2004 parliamentary elections, the Council of Guardians, the body set up after Khomeini's death to protect the purity of the revolution, systematically vetted all the candidates, disqualifying virtually any politician associated with the country's reform movements, thereby ensuring that the hardliners were able to win a significant majority. The same tactics were employed in the election that awarded Ahmadinejad the presidency the following year, and the Guards were so over-enthusiastic in their efforts to ensure victory for Ahmadinejad that they somehow managed to generate six million more votes than there were voters. And now this pattern of state-sponsored vote-rigging is so well-established in Iran, the West is likely to be frustrated in its hope that the Iranian people might be allowed to express their true feelings about Ahmadinejad's presidency in the elections which are due to take place this June.