TEHRAN, Iran (AP) – The groundswell that carried Tehran’s hard-line mayor to the presidency had humble origins – places such as a wobbly bench on a small wedge of grass.

It’s a spot Hasan Zafarian comes sometimes to think about the facts that keep him up at night. He has a university engineering degree, yet only a part-time job in a shoe warehouse. No savings. No car. He turns 30 in two months.

“But, maybe, God willing, I have someone on my side now,” he said Saturday, holding a photo of the bearded populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who shot from provincial obscurity to Tehran city hall to Iran’s highest elected office in just two years.

A main reason is gloomy, tread-water folks like Zafarian. Ahmadinejad won them over with a simple but profound act: He paid attention.

His campaign rarely strayed from the uncomfortable realities of poverty, unemployment and limited options squeezing millions of Iranians; apartment blocks with crumbling facades; and hardscrabble villages. For many, the concerns about social freedoms and human rights were distant rumbles.

“The reformists had forgotten about the poor people,” said political analyst Vahid Pourostad.

In Friday’s presidential runoff election, Ahmadinejad steamrolled Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, one of Iran’s best-known statesman, taking more than 61 percent of the vote.

The lessons of Ahmadinejad’s startling rise will take weeks to fully digest, but it almost immediately rearranged sensibilities.

Vast impoverished corners of Iran suddenly felt noticed. Progressive groups fighting to protect reforms moaned they were doubly orphaned – losing both the election and a sympathetic president, Mohammad Khatami, who helped spur progress after taking office in 1997.

“People have been talking about head scarves and TV shows and music. Wonderful,” said Hamid Nowrouzi, 30, a machinist. “But what about talking about having enough to eat or raise a family?”

Ahmadinejad’s one-word campaign catchphrase – “Dignity” – resonated strongly in a country that, on paper at least, should not have a per capita gross domestic product of about $7,500 a year, about a fifth of the United States and in the same neighborhood as Bulgaria and Romania.

Iran is the No. 2 OPEC producer, and foreign investors are salivating for Iran’s hungry consumer market.

But the ruling theocracy controls all important business policies and contracts, and critics say it has fostered a cozy and corruption-riddled system. The group Transparency International ranked Iran about the middle of the pack in its 2004 “corruption perception” index, ahead of India but behind Mongolia.

Official statistics say unemployment is about 16 percent, but some analysts place the true figure above 30 percent. Some reports also say up to 40 percent of Iranians live under the poverty line – the point where income cannot keep pace with basic needs.

The 49-year-old Ahmadinejad was unnoticed before the first round of voting June 17. Few gave him a chance to challenge Rafsanjani, a self-proclaimed moderate who served as president in 1989-1997. But Ahmadinejad stunned them all, finishing No. 2 behind a shaken Rafsanjani.

Widespread allegations said the Revolutionary Guards and other hard-line factions intimidated voters and manipulated the vote to nudge Ahmadinejad into second place, but the ruling clerics who backed him confirmed the result.

Dismayed pro-reform groups flooded behind Rafsanjani. But Ahmadinejad deftly avoided salvos with liberals, who fear he could push Iran back toward the rigid codes after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. He offered only a terse and vague: “I am against extremism.”

He counterattacked by portraying the wealthy Rafsanjani as aloof and pampered. Then he rolled out proposals to redistribute government largesse to the provinces and urban poor, boost health and insurance benefits, offer zero-interest agriculture loans and raise minimum pay scales.

It is unclear how much will become reality, but theocracy can open any door if willing.

Business leaders reacted with alarm. To them, Ahmadinejad is an Islamic socialist who eventually will clamp down on private enterprise and the Tehran Stock Exchange.

Still, he did not fight back directly. He only said that Iran was drifting from the values of the revolution – which sounds scary to Western-oriented Iranians but appeals strongly to those who believe the modernizing of Iran has left them in the dust.

In a final TV campaign pitch Wednesday, he described the Iranian everyman: making the equivalent of about $150 a month and crushed by bills and inflation hovering around 15 percent.

“How can such a person have dignity in front of his children and wife?” he said. “How can a family respect him if he cannot even take care of them?”

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