TEHRAN — Iran’s hard-line president took a final shot at his rivals Wednesday during his last public pre-election rally, accusing them of resorting to a smear campaign against him similar to the one used by Adolf Hitler’s propaganda minister.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is locked in a neck-and-neck race against reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi. Both have launched intense political attacks against each other and have turned the presidential election into a display of Iran’s deep political divides.
Heightening the tension before the race, a top official of Iran’s hard-line elite Revolutionary Guards accused Ahmadinejad’s reformist opponents of seeking to launch a “velvet revolution” — alluding to the 1989 ouster of the communist government of what was then Czechoslovakia — and vowing to crush any such attempts.
Yadollah Javani said, in remarks published Wednesday on a Guards website, that reformists plan to claim vote rigging should their candidate lose in Friday’s vote and provoke street violence.
The Iranian president and Mousavi have accused each other of using Hitler-like propaganda tactics in order to win on Friday.
