Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s allies have won all of the capital’s 30 seats in parliament, with 90 percent of votes counted from last week’s election, state television reported on Sunday.
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Early results indicate that the reformist candidates are leading the race for parliamentary seats in capital city of Tehran.
Prominent conservative candidate Gholamali Haddad-Adel, meanwhile, trailed at 31st place.
Rouhani and his key ally and ex-President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani were leading the race for the Assembly of Experts, and appeared to be sure of winning seats, according to Reuters.
Conservatives were also experiencing setbacks in the election to the Assembly of Experts, an 88-member group of clerics that would pick Khamenei’s successor if he dies in the next eight years.
Iranian President Hassan Rouhani won an emphatic vote of confidence and reformist partners secured surprise gains in parliament in early results from elections that could accelerate the Islamic Republic’s emergence from years of isolation.
“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.
But while the reformists have made impressive gains in Tehran, they haven’t fared as well in the provinces.
During his 2½ years, Rouhani, a former nuclear negotiator, was instrumental in signing a deal that limited Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for sanctions relief.
According to Foad Izadi, a politics professor at Tehran University’s Faculty of World Studies, the nuclear agreement and the removal of sanctions were major factors behind the reformists’ advances in Tehran.
Iran has dozens of political groupings and organizations, but no major, long-standing parties like in the West. Broadly speaking, the election is a showdown between hardliners in one camp, and relative moderates supporting Rouhani and reformists on the other. Partial results released by the government showed 26 reformists among the 30 front-runners and just one hardliner.
Voters: Nearly 55 million people were registered to vote; the country has a population of about 80 million people.
Members of the Assembly serve eight-year terms, while members of parliament are elected every four years. Participation figures were not immediately available, but Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli on Saturday said turnout likely exceeded 60 percent based on the partial counting of the votes.
In a bid to squeeze them out, reformists have allied with moderate conservatives, many of whom split with the hard liners because of Ahmadinejad.
The final results from the elections are expected on Monday.
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“It is a very big victory”, said analyst Saeed Leylaz, a former adviser to former reformist President Mohammad Khatami. After disputed 2009 presidential elections, Mesbah-Yazdi strongly supported official victor Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and was seen as his mentor.
