Just 10 days earlier, Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had praised those two clerics, as well as hard-line Ayatollah Ali Jannati, who barely clung to his seat.
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“We can say that a balance was actually observed here and the liberals, if necessary, will be able to carry out necessary decisions through the parliament”, Stanislav Pritchin added.
But outside the capital, initial results indicate that the showing was not so buoyant, and we must remember that Iran has had a pro-reform Parliament and a moderate president before; that synergy did little in the face of the overwhelming structural and economic advantages the system affords hard-liners and their institutions.
In any country, election results usually suggest how people feel about big social and economic issues.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei too accused the United Kingdom of intervening in Iran’s affairs, saying the BBC is giving the people of Tehran instructions to vote or not to vote for specific individuals.
But Toumaj cautioned westerners not to read too much into the election results, noting that radicals still dominate the Assembly of Experts, The Guardian Council, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps – an ideologically driven militia that controls virtually every aspect of Iranian society under the watchful eye of the Ayatollah.
Other incumbent hardliners also lost their seats.
The head of the Iranian Ministry of Internal Affairs, Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, said that moderates gained 59% of seats in the Assembly of Experts of the 5th convocation, which consists of 88 scholars and Sharia experts. Voters also elected President Rouhani and some of his supporters to the mainly conservative assembly of experts which is charged with selecting the supreme leader.
Mr Rouhani took the unusual step of seeking membership of the Assembly himself – and he was duly elected in first place.
Reuters’ tally of the official results had “conservatives” retaining the edge in Parliament with 40 percent of the seats, compared to 30 percent for reformists and 17 percent for independents.
Assembly chief, hard-line Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, was not re-elected. In a note to subscribers, Ian Bremmer, a geopolitical expert and president of global political risk research firm Eurasia Group, said that the results of the elections showed “Iran is on the upswing and politically stable”.
16 women who had applied to run for the latter were disqualified.
With elections having eliminated politicians that opposed his historic nuclear deal, President Hassan Rouhani will now seek to transform Iran’s economy and secure another term in office next year.
All the 30 candidates under the Reformist list for Tehran have been voted into parliament, blocking all the candidates from the conservative list.
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“The. election was a referendum on Rouhani, and the vote came back ‘yes, ‘” said analyst Cliff Kupchan of the New York-based Eurasia Group. The most hardline “Principalist” slate in the Majlis elections won only 68 seats, down from its 100 seats in the previous Majlis. In one of its most unusual aspects, the list featured eight female candidates, who have all made it into parliament.
