One of them grabs a poster for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad from a passing motorcyclist and begins waving it at the other drivers, most of them stunned that a fashionable woman wearing hijab lite would support the hard-line Iranian president. 'Are you serious?' one man tells her. 'Do you know what Ahmadinejad's (Islamic) guidance patrol would do to you if they saw you?' A car full of other friends pulls up alongside. They are holding up posters of former prime minister Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a moderate who is Ahmadinejad's top rival in Friday's presidential election. 'Doctor, go to the doctor!' they chant, a popular slogan mocking both Ahmadinejad's doctoral degree in traffic management and his mental health. 'Only Ahmadinejad!' my friends chant back, laughing. Even though it's a work night, all sorts of people are out, holding up flags and banners of green, the Mousavi campaign's official color, as the inching cars honk their horns in what has emerged as a distinctive call sign of Mousavi's supporters. One street rally has turned into a discotheque, with young men dancing to pop music and women standing up through sunroofs cheering them on. 'You don't know how to dance!' one woman calls out to a group of young men in green T-shirts. 'Dance better.' These are strange, magical days in Iran, where a landmark presidential race pitting Ahmadinejad against Mousavi and two other challengers has opened the country's political and public spaces to an extent not seen since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Students have called the president a liar to his face. Carnival-like demonstrations erupt on the streets. Ordinary people engage in lively political debates with strangers on street corners. In the countryside, campaign posters plaster walls in sleepy, ancient mud-brick enclaves far from the main highways, where women in all-covering black chadors sweep past stark golden desert landscapes. (Begin optional trim) Shopkeepers, farmers and retirees hold impromptu debates, disagreeing amicably with each other, over the country's problems and talking about its leaders, once almost all turbaned clerics above reproach, as if they were athletes battling it out on the sports field. It's been a thrilling ride, with impromptu rallies sprouting in town and city squares alike. But beneath the good-spirited fun, there is an undercurrent of danger, highlighted by the walkie-talkie-toting plainclothes security officials hovering around the crowds and the bare-knuckled chants that the rival groups hurl at each other. (End optional trim) In addition to revealing the repressed swell of youthful energy, the election season has laid bare Iran's many divisions: between rural and urban; religious and secular; working class and educated; old and young; those for whom the outside world remains a threat to their way of life and those who look outside Iran for ideas and opportunities. Iran tends to loosen up during quadrennial elections. The debates get a little more heated and street life a little less staid. But you never had anything like this year. A lengthy late-summer rainstorm discourages no one. During this political season, Tehran traffic, always horrific, has graduated to apocalyptic, Mousavi's supporters flooding roadways to counter Ahmadinejad's advantages in media, and the president's supporters calling loyal Baiji militiamen in response. The big cities seemingly are a lock for Mousavi, as are the western provinces near Azerbaijan, where the country's most influential ethnic group loves the former prime minister, who is himself Azeri. But Mousavi supporters concede that they probably will lose the votes of rural and urban poor who were the beneficiaries of Ahmadinejad's populist economic programs. Over four years, he doled out billions in low or no-interest housing, agriculture and wedding loans that spurred inflation and real estate speculation but gave a short-term economic fix to the nation's poor and pious. 'They gave out loans to people who could have never built houses otherwise,' says Reza Shah-Ragabi, 40, who raises watermelons in the central Iranian village of Gorgab. 'We support Ahmadinejad because he shares the rural worldview.' (Begin optional trim) Still, there are some signs that not everyone in the countryside supports the president. On a field outside the hamlet of Habibabad, Gholam-Reza Ravanbakhsh, 20, works his father's alfalfa fields but dreams of a different life. He earned his high school degree and wants to study engineering, maybe travel abroad. His entire family will vote for Ahmadinejad, but he confides that he probably will vote for Mousavi. 'For me, the most important thing is the future of the young people,' he says, wiping the dust from his eyeglasses. (End optional trim) Ahmadinejad's mostly poor urban supporters are more inchoate. Their bond to the president is emotional more than intellectual. 'He's very brave,' says one female supporter of the president, who declines to give her name. 'He stood up to the West on our nuclear program, and he stood up to the fat cats here.' But in Ahmadinejad's attempts to stifle the joyous spirit of youth and restore the austerity and piety of the early years after the revolution, he may have sown the seeds of his own downfall. He has angered an entire generation of apolitical young Iranians more inclined to party than organize, more interested in pursuing ambitious careers and remodeling their noses than campaigning on the streets. 'He's beat us down so much,' says Adeleh, a 30-year-old Tehran dentist and Mousavi supporter who describes how she was detained one day a few months ago by the dreaded guidance patrol, the morality police, who hauled her to jail for wearing an outfit not deemed Islamic enough. 'Look at me!' she says, pointing to her elegant black coat and headscarf. 'Do I look improper? When I told them I was a dentist, they were almost worse toward me, as if it was a crime to be a professional woman.' Along Vali Asr Street, a young woman wearing battery-powered green devil's horns hangs outside a car window. She holds her hands in a victory salute as motorcyclists holding Ahmadinejad posters course past through the traffic. She and the young men scowl at each other but say nothing. 