With 90% of the votes counted on Sunday, the reformists in Iran have won all 30 parliamentary seats in capital Tehran and are leading over their rivals across the nation.
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Results for Tehran province, which is the country’s most populous, showed a sweep by reformists of all its 30 parliamentary seats.
Mohammad Reza Aref, the most prominent reformist candidate, was at the top of the list, and the sole hard-liner, Gholamali Haddad Adel, was 10th.
Rouhani and former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a relative moderate, led in Tehran, which will send 16 candidates to the assembly, the official IRNA news agency reported.
In his first comments since the elections, Iran’s deeply anti-Western Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, praised the high turnout but made no direct comment on the results.
“No one is able to resist against the will of the majority of the people and whoever the people don’t want has to step aside”, he said in a message on Twitter, referring to the contest for the 290-seat parliament and 88-member Assembly of Experts.
“In this campaign Rouhani and his coalition have been saying that the nuclear deal was first step to economic and political dignity, and that these elections were the next step”, said Marashi of the National Iranian American Council.
The assembly’s current chairman, Mohammad Yazdi, in 17th, and the arch-conservative Mesbah-Yazdi, in 19th, appeared unlikely to win a seat, according to partial results. He said he hoped the final results would promote Iran’s position in the region and across the globe.
Iran has dozens of political groupings and organizations, but no major, longstanding parties like in the West. Broadly speaking, the election is a showdown between hard-liners in one camp, and relative moderates supporting Rouhani and reformists on the other. But early indications at the reformers have scored well in these elections. Ayatollah Jannati and his allies in the Guardian Council disqualified Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, from running in Friday’s vote. If he were to die in the next eight years, the newly elected Assembly of Experts would select the next supreme leader.
Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli said Saturday that some 33 million people – almost 60% of eligible voters – turned out in the twin elections.
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Rouhani follows Mahmoud Ahmadinejad into office.
