ISFAHAN, Iran (AP) - Iran’s hard-line president accused his reformist predecessor on Saturday of humiliating the country by suspending a key part of its nuclear program.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is facing a tough battle for re-election next month, used a news conference with Iranian journalists to attack the reformist camp a day after campaigning officially began.

Facing criticism for 25 percent inflation and rising unemployment, Ahmadinejad chose to focus his remarks elsewhere,

boasting of the strides Iran has made in its nuclear program in defiance of the United States and the other world powers seeking to curtail the country’s atomic activity.

"Humiliation of the Iranian nation in the previous government was unprecedented," the official IRNA news agency quoted Ahmadinejad as telling the reporters.

Under former President Mohammad Khatami, Iran suspended uranium enrichment in 2003 as a confidence building measure to ease fears that Iran was secretly building nuclear weapons. International powers demanded a permanent halt to enrichment, and Iran - still under Khatami - resumed uranium reprocessing activities in August 2005.

Ahmadinejad, who was mayor of Tehran, was elected in 2005 and the next year restarted enrichment work that produced the country’s first nuclear fuel. Besides making fuel for power plants, the technology can also be used to build weapons. Iran says it is only pursuing peaceful uses, such as power generation.

Ahmadinejad said that under Khatami Iran pursued a foreign policy of detente, cooperated with the U.S. in the war in Afghanistan and yet was branded by former U.S. President George W. Bush as part of an "axis of evil" with North Korea and Iraq in 2002.

He said his government’s decision to restart enrichment brought Iran prestige and global power and neutralized military threats.

"The result of policy of detente was that all our nuclear facilities were sealed," IRNA quoted him as saying.

In other campaigning Saturday, leading challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi, a reformist, told a rally that Ahmadinejad’s hard-line policies have defamed Iran and undermined the dignity of Iranians.

Reformists, who seek an easing of social and political restrictions at home and better ties with the West, see a strong opportunity to unseat Ahmadinejad in the June 12 presidential election.