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‘World becoming Ahmadinejadised’

TEHRAN: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said the world is “rapidly becoming Ahmadinejadised” and that global leaders have started following in his footsteps, press reports said Tuesday.

“I have travelled to all the continents except for one and I know what is going on out there. Everybody is eager to hear the Iranian people’s message,” the reformist Aftab-Yazd newspaper quoted the president as saying, adding, “The world is rapidly becoming Ahmadinejadised.”

The austere hardliner said that Iran’s “two big missions are constructing the country and introducing a model for humanity.” World leaders, he added, had started copying his provincial trips, during which he pledges to create jobs and fight poverty. “When I telephone other leaders, I am told that they are on trips. Their trips are the same as the provincial tours that I have initiated,” he said. So far, Ahmadinejad has gone on 21 provincial trips to look into local problems. “This government has risen from people’s prayers,” he said of his presidential electoral victory. “Someone even told me that he had vowed to say Salavats (a one-line formula to praise the Prophet Mohammed) as many times as my electoral votes count,” Ahmadinejad said, referring to his June 2005 shock win by more than 17 million votes over pragmatist cleric Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Since rising to power, the president has roused nationalist sentiments and pushed through a populist economic agenda. Ahmadinejad ran on a platform of distributing the country’s oil riches, “spreading justice”, combating corruption and vowing a “new Islamic revolution”. afp

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