More than six weeks after the heavily contested June 12 re-election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the country’s highest authority officially endorsed the hard-line Iranian leader’s second term on Monday.

The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, presided over a ceremony in which he officially authorised the disputed June 12 vote results that handed Ahmadinejad a second four-year term amid claims of fraud by the opposition and newly exposed splits within the political establishment.

In the weeks that followed the poll, widespread public protests calling for a new vote sparked the worst political unrest the country had seen since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

In a potent sign that internal political turmoil continues to brew, several key figures were notably absent from today’s ceremony.

Turmoil elicits differing analyses Neda: a young woman's death becomes a rallying cry Duelling claims for power Mousavi, improbable leader of the green wave

“They are keeping up the [pressure] and not going ahead with the election results,” he said.

A discreet endorsement

Although Ahmadinejad will be officially sworn in by parliament on August 5, in many ways today’s endorsement by the supreme leader is more significant. “This is more important than the ceremony on Wednesday,” said Pouladi.

But the way today’s ceremony went ahead was “unusual”, said Borzou Daragahi, the Los Angeles Times’ Middle East correspondent, reporting from Beirut. “Usually they broadcast the ceremony with the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, endorsing the president live on television,” said Daragahi.

This time, only a one-line announcement on state-run TV heralded the endorsement Ahmadinejad’s second term.

“We have nothing more – we have no pictures, no images of officials gathered around,” he says. “It’s a little unusual.”

The authorities might naturally be concerned that today’s events prove another rallying point for more opposition protests, Daragahi suggested. But they may also be trying to hide how deeply unpopular Ahmadinejad’s re-election is, even within Tehran’s political elite.  

“The people who would see these images would see how few officials have attended this ceremony,” explained Daragahi.

Many high-level dignitaries have vowed to skip the ceremony entirely, and some top clergy have even issued a fatwa – or religious edict – saying it was acceptable not to attend.

As the first 100 detained protesters faced trial on Saturday, Mousavi denounced the establishment’s use of “medieval-era torture” methods to extract confessions from those accused.

Despite its pledge to keep up pressure on the establishment, however, the opposition faces some existential problems of its own.

“They’re not really well organised, their leadership is kind of murky,” Daragahi said.

Click to see a bigger image.

And yet the time seems ripe for leading the charge for change. “They are riding on this huge wave of visceral energy – anger created not only by the election results, [but] also by years and years of frustration with the restrictions of the Islamic republic,” said Daragahi. “This fuel for the fire [is] really what’s driving this movement.”