Reformists and moderates also won 59% of seats in the Assembly of Experts, AP said. All three retained their seats in the Assembly of Experts in the election. A push by their supporters, largely on social media, helped eject current assembly chair Mohammad Yazdi and the ultraconservative Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, formerly a close adviser to ex-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, another hardliner.
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A prominent exception was Ahmad Jannati, who squeezed in at 16th place. Jannati also heads the Guardians Council, the unelected, constitutional watchdog that disqualified hundreds of reformist candidates from the parliamentary and assembly votes.
The leader of the hardline candidates in Tehran, Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, a former speaker of Parliament, joined the prominent casualties of the election. Nevertheless, says Kasra Naji of the BBC Persian service, “the results are a huge setback for hardliners”.
The outgoing parliament had acted as a brake on Mr Rouhani’s plans to strengthen the private sector, tackle corruption and welcome foreign investors.
Still, the partial results so far indicate the best reformist and moderate showing in more than a decade. Iran’s relationship with America is still complex and controversial.
The Islamic Republic’s unique dual system of clerical and republican rule places decisive power in the hands of a conservative Islamic establishment, which has shown in the past its ability to reassert control when it feels threatened.
But Iran wants to be regarded as an equal partner, able to sit at the world’s top tables to work on common threats like the so-called Islamic State.
That should make the assembly less hostile to Rouhani, a moderate elected in 2013 on pledges to relax restrictions on freedom of expression and improve ties with the West.
Hardliners have responded by accusing reformists of colluding with the West to block conservative appointments to the country’s Assembly of Experts. “In the current highly sensitive situation in the region (where) insecurity has engulfed some countries, the lively holding of the elections of the Assembly of Experts and Majlis (parliament) in a completely calm and orderly atmosphere can serve as a model of democracy for nations”.
The outcome signalled strong public support for last year s nuclear deal between Iran and world powers, an agreement steered by Rouhani which saw the lifting of sanctions in January after years of economic hurt. “The independents will play a key role in the next parliament’s decisions”, said political analyst Hamid Farahvashian. “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.
President Rouhani called on global companies to cooperate with Iran to develop the country’s auto making industry.
“The competition is over”.
“The auto industry must be completely privatised, it must be competitive”, Rouhani said in a televised address to an global carmakers’ conference in Tehran.
Despite securing the nuclear deal he has faced resistance at home to domestic reform.
Interior Minister Abdel Reda Rahmani Fazli says 62 percent of Iranians across the country and 50 percent in the capital, Tehran, participated.
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Bremmer, of Eurasia Group, noted that the limited selection of candidates, many of them hand-picked, was not surprising.
