It was unclear how the turnout might shape the outcome.
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“Whoever likes Iran and its dignity, greatness and glory should vote”.
Polling stations opened at 8 a.m.in constituencies nationwide, with some 55 million people eligible to elect the 290-seat parliament. Both are now in the hands of hardliners. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has held that position since 1989 and if the Assembly at some point has to choose a successor to Khamenei, who’s 76, that decision could determine Iran’s direction for years or decades to come.
Reformists are hoping to increase their influence in both institutions, which have been dominated by conservatives.
Most of the 3,000 reformist hopefuls were barred from running by the Guardian Council, a cleric-led constitutional watchdog that vets election candidates.
“I’m sure the Iranian nation… with their well-known insight, will continue the path of the Imam and the leadership”, he said, in a nod to the Islamic republic’s founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and his successor, Khamenei.
President Hassan Rouhani casts his vote in the ballot box. Mohammad, who gave only his first name, chose not to vote, despite being an active reformist in the late 1990s and joining post-election street protests in 2009 over a disputed presidential election. The parliament has some oversight over the budget and public spending, and a say in the approval and questioning of government ministers. It would change “nothing”, she said.
Voters said they anxious about economic issues and hoped for a better future after the nuclear deal.
Officials are yet to release early results but reports in the semiofficial Fars and Mehr news agencies and a count conducted by The Associated Press show that hard-liners are the main losers of the vote.
Observers will be closely watching turnout figures, with higher voter participation expected to benefit moderates and reformers.
While MPs are elected for four years, the assembly will be granted an eight-year term.
In Samangan, home to the former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, dozens of people were waiting outside the Great Mosque, with its handsome Arabic calligraphy praising the Shia martyr Hussein, an hour before polling started, with a bus drafted in later to serve as an overflow polling station. There were 4,844 final candidates, the Interior Ministry said Thursday.
Influential former president Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, allied to Rouhani, said Iranians knew this was a day of destiny, comparing it to “Laylat al-Qadr”, the “night of destiny” in which Muslims believe the first verses of the Quran were revealed to the Prophet Muhammad.
“Hopefully once we win a majority our first step will be an economic boom in the next parliament”, he said.
Iranians are making their way to the polls to take part in two elections that will play a major role in shaping the country’s future in the coming years.
Perhaps their biggest failure was the conclusion of the landmark nuclear agreement between Iran and the six world powers in July 2015 achieved by Rouhani’s diplomatic apparatus, which they had raucously opposed since the beginning, as it included a rare detente with the United States and the West, and the opening up of Iran to the global community, which they dislike by nature and ideologically.
Hundreds of onlookers cheered Hassan Khomeini, a politically moderate cleric, when he arrived to vote at Jamaran, witnesses said. The council later reversed some of those disqualifications. There’s also a vote for the Islamic Republic’s top clerical assembly, which probably will pick the next supreme leader.
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Iran’s system of government invests a lot of power in the supreme leader and the Guardian Council, which approves all laws and has already put its stamp on the election by rejecting most of the moderate and almost all of the reformist candidates who registered to run. Results likely will not be announced until Saturday at the earliest.
