Friday’s twin elections for parliament and the clerical assembly were the first to be held in Iran since it struck a landmark nuclear deal with world powers a year ago that brought about the lifting of crippling worldwide sanctions.
Advertisement
The reformist list won the majority of the votes in the capital city, denying the rival Principlists all the 30 seats allocated to the Tehran constituency but so far the mix shows something around 60% of seats having gone to Principlists already, 40% reformist and moderates and 20% independents.
Moderates in Iran have won majorities in both the country’s parliament and a key clerical body in elections that were seen as a referendum on the policies of moderate President Hassan Rouhani.
Mohammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi, the spiritual leader of hardliners and mentor of former hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also lost his seat in the assembly.
A prominent exception was Ahmad Jannati, who squeezed in at 16th place.
According to the Interior Ministry of Iran, reformers received at least 85 seats in the Majlis, moderates received 73 seats, conservatives received 68 seats, while members of religious minorities and the Armenian community received 5 seats.
“There is a feel-good factor for the population in the sense that the general outcome is one that satisfies public opinion because it sees stark improvement in the situation of moderates and because it gave the public an opportunity to express dissatisfaction with the hardliners, even though they are aware that in actual policy terms that might not make a difference”, said Khonsari.
Despite the early results showing the reformists dominating, analysts still say they don’t expect anyone to secure a 146 seat majority in parliament.
“The biggest achievement of this election is the return of reformists to the ruling system…so they won’t be called seditionists or infiltrators anymore”, he said, referring to hardliners who accused reformists of links to the West. The pro-Rouhani “List of Hope ” appears to have won all 30 parliamentary seats in Iranian capital, according to BBC. He said turnout was 62 percent and there had been very few irregularities.
“I say from the bottom of my heart, these youth today are more revolutionary than we were”. All three retained their seats in the Assembly of Experts in the election.
“In economic affairs the next parliament will be much better than the current parliament”, said economist Saeed Leylaz, once an advisor to reformist former president Mohammad Khatami.
It is being described as a blow to Iran’s conservative Islamic establishment.
By contrast, 15 of the 16 candidates running in Tehran on the list headed by Rouhani and his veteran political backer, former president Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, were resoundingly voted in.
Polling for the country’s 290 MPs takes place every four years, while the 88 members of the Assembly are elected for eight years – and this year the two elections coincided.
Mr Rouhani was making his first major speech since it became clear that moderates and reformists who support him had made major gains.
The results indicate that political moderation, Rouhani’s main promise when he campaigned for the presidency in 2013, is slowly reshaping Iranian politics.
Friday’s vote ended more than a decade of conservative domination of the legislature and the Assembly of Experts, a body that oversees the Islamic republic’s supreme leader.
Advertisement
“No more trivial debates, no more complaining of shaking hands with American officials, no more shouting and screaming from the Parliament seats”, said Farshad Ghorbanpour, an analyst with close ties to the Rouhani government.
