Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the surprise winner of the Iranian election, is a hardliner who has vowed to resist international pressure on Iran to give up its nuclear program. Diplomats and world-leaders have been caught cat-napping. None had expected the victory of the Islamist mayor of Tehran and his election threatens to hamper attempts by Germany, France and Great Britain to engage Iran in nuclear talks. Ahmadinejad's election also threatens to slam the door on liberal reforms in Iran, heralding a return to the ideals of the 1979 revolution. United States Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld voiced his own concerns, branding Ahmadinejad "no friend of democracy," and the election looks set to further strain relations between Washington and Tehran. German commentators are unsurprisingly concerned.

The center-left Sueddeutsche Zeitung laments the loss of the last bastion of progressive government in Iran. "The last brake on conservative power has been lost. (Conservatives) control the armed forces, the secret service, police, justice, the economy, parliament and a large part of the media," the commentator neatly establishes. "In the future, the executive will belong to them as well." The paper points out that Ahmadinejad has not been elected on an anti-American ticket, rather to fill the stomachs of the poor and to find them work. However it doubts whether the new president is really up to the job. In his role as mayor he may have built a few motorways, planted flowers and distributed food, but even his close friends attest he is woefully ignorant of economic matters. Worryingly, the paper goes on, "He doesn't have a clue about the outside world." Going for the jugular, the commentator barks: "What strikes one about Ahmadinejad is his meagre intellectual ability." The reform movement has suffered a long-term setback, the paper solemnly concludes, perhaps a permanent one.

The conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine chooses not to focus on Ahmadinejad's intellectual credentials and instead highlights the profound threat posed by the new president to the cohesion of Iranian society. The surprise victory of an Islamist candidate was the result of a protest vote against a "rich, corrupt and unscrupulous" political establishment, the paper asserts. And nobody embodied that world better than opposition candidate Ali Akhbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a "rich, corrupt and unscrupulous" man who had been in power for a quarter-century. The result does, however, pose a real threat to the fine social balance in Iranian society. On the one hand there is the Islamic Republic -- religious, politically conservative and largely poor -- and on the other, there is the increasingly secular, well-off middle and upper classes. The commentator fears the educated elite, who had begun to enjoy greater cultural and economic freedoms in Iran, will now leave the country in even greater numbers than before. For the west, the election of Mr Ahmadinejad is a major headache. On the nuclear issue, the commentator points out, "The danger of escalation is even greater."

The feisty, left-leaning Die Tagezeitung echoes the same sentiment, under a headline "Iranians have voted for danger." With the defeat of the Rafsanjani, who had pledged normalization of relations with the west, the paper excitedly predicts that "hardliners in Washington will be digging their war plans out of the shoebox once again." The commentator clearly believes this to be a bad idea though, describing a war in Iran as "a march into hell."

The usually sober Financial Times Deutschland joins in the general bellicosity. "It's about nothing less than the prevention of a new war," its commentator exclaims. The paper hopes Ahmadinejad will stick to what he knows best and leave foreign policy matters well alone. The president's repeated claim in his first press conference that Iran had an indefatigable right to the peaceful use of nuclear technology has clearly got the paper worried. Should Ahmadinejad continue to bang the nuclear drum, the international community can expect to reckon with serious fallout. The new balance of power in Iran makes the possibility of a compromise (as favored by the European Union negotiating troika of Germany, Britain and France) that much harder to achieve. The commentator worries that the United States will not tolerate European meddling forever, and should talks collapse altogether, the prospects are, indeed, bleak.

The conservative Die Welt cheekily contrasts Ahmadinejad's recent victory with French President Jacques Chirac's election contest against right-winger Jean-Marie Le Pen. In both cases a liberal-minded favorite took on a hardliner, with the right-wing candidate rated as a rank outsider to win and expected only to drive floating voters to the left. Whereas Le Pen predictably lost, Mr Ahmadinejad defied all the pundits, and shocked commentators, by grabbing the presidency. The paper also draws attention to Ahmadinejad's shady past. When challenged on a rumor that he single-handedly shot 1,000 men in a Tehran prison, earning himself the less than imaginative nickname "thousand-shot man," Ahmadinejad apparently responded with a wry smile. Iran's poor are out for revenge, the commentator goes on. Revenge against the mullahs for lining their pockets with oil dollars to finance lavish lifestyles, revenge on Iranian women brave enough to let their veils slip and revenge on a burgeoning 5-million-strong Internet community for its embrace of western ways. In the foreign policy arena, the paper insists the international community should stop giving Iran the kid-glove treatment. Ahmadinejad is no Gorbachev -- therefore, "Let's end the leniency," it ends.