Peugeot 504 - Politics

Politics

In November 2010. Iranian state television announced Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was to auction off his 1977 Peugeot 504 to raise money for charity. The car is white with a sky-blue interior, and has covered only 37,000 km since new. The political significance of the car being a 504 is that it was used as a working-class status symbol to draw electoral support from the less well-off during the 2005 presidential campaign. The money earned from the sale at international auction is to be donated to the Mehr housing project, a network of cooperatives that provides affordable housing for low-income families.

Soon after being put on auction in January 2011, a bid of $1 million was received from "an Arab country". When the auction closed in March 2011, the final bid was $2.5 million.

Read more about this topic:  Peugeot 504

Famous quotes containing the word politics:

    The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all.
    Ben C. Bradlee (b. 1921)

    I think the Senate ought to realize that I have to have about me those in whom I have confidence; and unless they find a real blemish on a man, I do not think they ought to make partisan politics out of appointments to the Cabinet.
    Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)

    His talk was like a spring, which runs
    With rapid change from rocks to roses:
    It slipped from politics to puns,
    It passed from Mahomet to Moses;
    Beginning with the laws which keep
    The planets in their radiant courses,
    And ending with some precept deep
    For dressing eels, or shoeing horses.
    Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802–1839)