For someone who presided over the imprisonment of his competitors in the last presidential election, and routinely trolled sensible people everywhere by denying the Holocaust, this has been a humbling decline. Having arrived with a bang, Ahmadinejad now seems fated to depart with a whimper. But if that comes as a disappointment to the president's supporters in Iran, it really shouldn't come as a surprise. Ahmadinejad, after all, was an unrepentant populist in a country where authentic populism has enormous odds stacked against it. It’s not that Ahmadinejad wasn’t effective at expressing a mixture of religious fealty and crude nationalism—it’s that Iran’s political system discovered it simply couldn’t tolerate the combination.
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