Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the US and Israel’s unlikely choice to lead Iran
Former Iranian president has a populist, headline-grabbing communication style but is an avowed anti-Zionist. How could Israel see him as a man to do business with?
For all their outward differences, there always seemed to be things that linked Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Donald Trump.
A visit to the then Iranian president’s rather humble Tehran neighbourhood nearly 20 years ago highlighted cost of living problems that prefigured those facing Trump now.
Amid soaring prices, the grocer at the end of Ahmadinejad’s street in the Narmak district was no longer stocking tomatoes, saying customers could not afford them and voicing a wish to close down. Shoppers at a nearby fruit and vegetable market complained at the cost of potatoes, onions and fish.
It seemed to represent a failure on the kitchen table issues that the populist leader had pledged to tackle. Trump critics will surely hear an echo.
Two decades later, that reporting trip has uncanny resonance amid reports that Israeli strikes on a security post were designed to free Ahmadinejad from house arrest and lead to his installation as Iran’s new leader.
The New York Times, citing official sources, reported that the US and Israel had identified the anti-western and anti-Zionist former president as the person they wanted to lead Iran after the regime’s presumed collapse in their face of their military onslaught.
The plan went awry almost immediately. The strikes, on the first day of the war on 28 February, killed the guards and injured Ahmadinejad, who was initially reported by Iranian media to have died. The former president, it is said, went to ground afterwards, having become “disillusioned” with the US-Israeli scheme. His whereabouts is not known.
There are several other mysteries as to how such a divisive figure became the poster boy for regime change in what has long been the west’s leading adversary in the Middle East.
On one level, a mutual attraction between Trump and Ahmadinejad is not so far-fetched. The pair share a populist, headline-grabbing communication style; similarities in their autocratic governing style have also been noted.
Cynics may add that the two have a common taste for overturning democratic election results. Compare Ahmadinejad’s hugely controversial 2009 election win – widely assumed to have been stolen – with Trump’s efforts to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in 2020.
But the real headspinner is Israel’s apparent choice of Ahmadinejad as a man it could do business with.
Styling himself as an Islamist populist, the former provincial mayor was arguably the key figure who set Iran and Israel on a long path to war after he was elected in 2005. Within weeks of taking office, he set the tone at a “World Without Zionism” conference in Tehran with remarks that were roughly translated as calling for Israel to be “wiped off the map”.
Ahmadinejad revelled in the backlash and his baiting of Israel became relentless. His government organised exhibitions and conferences satirising and challenging the veracity of the Holocaust. Amid it all, Ahmadinejad loudly championed the resumption of Iran’s nuclear programme, which had been stalled to allow negotiations and to build trust with the west.
It was a recipe for fear, hostility and mounting tensions – a toxic mix that has led to open warfare. And the man chosen to clear the air is the same one who did so much to pollute the atmosphere in the first place. How did it happen?
Washington policy insiders point to “a transformation” Ahmadinejad underwent after leaving office in 2013. He became increasingly disenchanted with the Iranian regime and fell out with the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, his one-time mentor who was killed on the opening day of the war.
In a measure of his alienation from the regime, he was rejected three times by a candidate vetting body when he tried to regain the presidency in 2017, 2021 and 2024.
A former White House adviser on Iran said: “He is a true populist and even when he was president, he would be focused much more on the nationalistic sides of Iran, the history and the Persian heritage stuff that the Islamic republic had mostly been dismissing. He was pretty public about his dissatisfaction with the trajectory of the Islamic republic and developed this really brilliant social media campaign.”
Regime-imposed restrictions on Ahmadinejad’s movements – which were not widely known about – may have been triggered by contacts with Israel, which some speculate could have occurred when he travelled to Hungary in 2024 and 2025 to speak at a university associated with the far-right government of Viktor Orbán.
“My understanding is that he showed some level of recognition that his antics [on Israel] were not helpful, and that he was willing to do things differently,” the former US official said.
It is not clear how Ahmadinejad would have taken over after the regime’s expected collapse – and whether he would have been accepted by a public that protested against him after the disputed 2009 election.
Alex Vatanka, head of the Iran programme at the Washington-based Middle East Institute, said: “If this was a genuine effort to go regime change, in many ways it is not a bad idea. Ahmadinejad certainly did start speaking as a very different man than he was first in 2005 when he became associated with his Holocaust denial rhetoric. [But] I do question whether he had the level of popularity to pull it off.”
More intriguing, said Vatanka, was why Ahmadinejad’s role as an agent of change was emerging now when hopes of toppling the regime appeared all but lost.
He added: “My first question is who leaked it and why? Are they trying to make the regime panic about the level of infiltration. Is this going to create a sense of anxiety and paranoia inside the regime in transition?
“This is a regime that has been badly infiltrated across the board for years. It was focused in the past on nuclear and military officials. Now a relative political heavyweight has been implicated. If you can tap into Ahmadinejad, who else can you tap into?”
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