On 24 June 2005 Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (pronounced mah-MOOD ah-mah-dih-nee-ZHAHD) was elected as Iran's president. Ahmadinejad swept to the presidential post with a stunning 17,046,441 votes out of a total of 27,536,069 votes cast in the runoff election. His rival and Expediency Council Chairman Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani gained only 9,841,346. A few days before the vote, Rafsanjani said that the race was "very close," but he believed he was "slightly ahead" of Ahmadinejad. When he took office in August 2005, Ahmadinejad became the first non-cleric president to lead Iran in 24 years.
Ahmadinejad represented a younger generation whose formative experience was the Iran-Iraq War. The Iran-Iraq War began in September 1980 when Iraqi army divisions entered Iran in a three front surprise attack. The war, which lasted 8 years, resulted in an estimated 300,000 Iranian deaths out of a population of about 60 million by the end of the war. A UN Resolution (Security Council Resolution 598) adopted in August 1988 only imposed a ceasefire. No relevant issues were solved. Reports of American involvement with Iraq during the war fueled Iranian anger towards the United States, despite equal reports of American support for Iran via Israel.
During the campaign, Ahmadinejad's backers had portrayed Rafsanjani as the Iranian equivalent of a political hack. The commonly heard sentiment about Ahmadinejad was that he remained a simple man, a backhanded slap at Rafsanjani, who was reported to have had amassed great personal wealth (a claim Rafsanjani denied). Ahmadinejad's populist platform, which included providing a monthly stipend to citizens, won votes from people concerned about economic issues such as unemployment. Ahmadinejad's main campaign advertisement was a film that showed him praying and addressing war veterans in military fatigues.
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