They have won all of the 30 parliamentary seats up for grabs in the capital and 15 out of the 16 Tehran seats in the so-called Assembly of Experts, ousting two prominent conservatives including the speaker.
Advertisement
While conservative and hardline newspapers claim making big gains across the country, the papers affiliated with moderates and reformists have concentrated on the overwhelming results achieved in Tehran in the first elections since the Islamic Republic clinched a nuclear deal with world powers.
Candidates from an alliance of pro-Rouhani moderates and reformists were ahead in races for all 30 of Tehran’s seats in the 290-member parliament with nearly all votes from Friday’s election counted, according to state television. So did Mohammad-Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, an arch-conservative who was widely seen as the spiritual mentor to former conservative president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
All candidates are vetted by a constitutional watchdog, The Guardian Council, for their loyalty to the state.
Support from reformists in the next parliament should make that easier, but the resurgent group is also likely to pressure the president for change and concrete progress on long-avoided hard issues such as demands to free political prisoners. “Reformists now hold fewer than 20 seats and have been virtually shut out of politics since losing their parliamentary majority in the 2004 elections”, the news service writes.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani waves after casting his vote during elections for the parliament and Assembly of Experts on Friday.
“The people showed their power once again and gave more credibility and strength to their elected government”, Rowhani said.
A number of seats will be decided in run-offs in late April because no candidate won the required 25 percent of votes cast.
Should Khamenei pass away or become incapacitated, the assembly would meet to vote on a successor, who could come from within the body or outside of it. They would then hold a secret ballot where the candidate would be chosen by a simple majority.
But by giving the Rouhani administration a popular endorsement, the result appears likely to leave the administration with more domestic political freedom to sign a deal if it chooses. However, while there are more moderates than conservatives confirmed in parliament, there are also many independents, though we won’t know the final numbers for some time.
Analyst Mehdi Mohammadi, a former adviser to hard-line former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili, conceded that these elections were a blow to conservatives in Tehran.
The vote for the Assembly of Experts was seen as highly significant as current supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 76, who is said to be in ill health.
A handout picture provided by the office of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Febr …
Advertisement
The Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli said that the turnout, out of about 55 million eligible voters, was around 50 percent in the capital Tehran and some 62 percent across the country.
