Partial results from Iran's disputed parliamentary election showed Islamic conservatives hostile to President Mohammad Khatami's liberal reforms cruising to an expected victory yesterday on a sharply lower turnout.
Interior Ministry figures showed conservatives had won 43 of the first 83 constituencies declared, out of 289 seats contested on Friday.
Reformists had won 21, and the rest went to independents of unknown sympathies. In 17 constituencies where no candidate polled more than 25 percent, there will be a run-off later.
Reformists branded the election rigged and many boycotted it after the unelected hardline Guardian Council banned 2,500 mainly reformist candidates, including 80 sitting lawmakers, prompting Washington to say the vote was neither free nor fair.
A conservative majority could spell an end to Khatami's seven-year experiment in allowing greater freedom of speech and loosening Islamic cultural and social restrictions, a drive that hardliners have tried to obstruct at every turn.
But conservative commentator Amir Mohebian, a policy adviser to Iran's senior clerical leaders, suggested the victors would use a velvet glove rather than an iron fist.
The new majority would usher in a second phase of reforms, implemented more effectively, he said, as attempts to impose a political and social crackdown would only generate a backlash.
But political analyst Hossein Rassam forecast an escalation of factional conflict.
"The reformists are aware that the conservatives will try to make deals with the European Union and will try to prevent this by being outspoken about the state of democracy in Iran," he told reporters. "This will antagonize the hardliners and will lead to arrests, the closure of more newspapers and so on."
A senior government official said between 20 and 22 million of the 46 million eligible voters had cast ballots.
If confirmed, that would put the turnout at between 43 and 48 percent, sharply down on the 67 percent who voted in 2000, when Khatami's reformist allies won two thirds of the seats, but more than the 40 percent or less that reformists had predicted.
The lowest previous turnout for a parliamentary election since the 1979 Islamic Revolution was 53 percent in 1980.
The clerical Guardian Council, which vets candidates and validates the results, gave a lower figure of 43 million for the electorate, which could enable it to claim a turnout of over 50 percent, a psychologically important threshold.
RSS