Iran’s moderates have dealt another blow to the country’s hardliners, winning the majority of seats in the elections on Friday last week for the Assembly of Experts, a clerical body empowered with choosing the nation’s supreme leader.
Top moderates — Iranian President Hassan Rouhani and former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani — won seats in the assembly, along with 50 other of their allies.
The vote for the 88-member Assembly of Experts was held at the same time as the country’s parliament elections.
The final results of the parliamentary vote were expected later yesterday, but the Iranian Ministry of Interior already said that allies of Rouhani won all 30 of Tehran’s legislative seats.
In the clerical assembly, the ministry said moderates won 59 percent of the seats. Although it is seen as a historic win for the moderates, several prominent hardliners, including Ayatollah Ahmad Jannati were re-elected.
Jannati, who finished last in Tehran, is also the hardline leader of the country’s Guardian Council, an unelected, constitutional watchdog that vets election candidates. He has been the most potent force to oppose democratic reforms and disqualify reformist candidates from the parliamentary balloting and also the clerical assembly vote.
Jannati and his allies in the Guardian Council disqualified Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, from running in Friday’s elections.
The most surprising was the loss of seats on the clerical assembly for some prominent hardliners, including Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, the current Experts Assembly chief who was not re-elected.
Mohammad Taqi Mesbah Yazdi, the spiritual leader of hardliners and mentor of former hardline Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, also lost his seat in the assembly.
The Assembly of Experts serves a function similar to that of the Vatican’s College of Cardinals, and will someday have to pick a successor to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. It also can directly challenge Khamenei’s rule, something it has never done.
The assembly is elected every eight years, but Friday’s twin elections for parliament and the assembly were the first to be held in Iran since it struck a landmark nuclear deal with world powers last year that brought about the lifting of crippling international sanctions.
The moderates previously held about 20 seats in the assembly and their win is seen as an expansion of their influence within the powerful body.
As for the parliament elections, none of Iran’s three main political camps — reformists, conservatives and hardliners — is expected to win an outright majority in the 290-seat house, but partial results so far indicate the best reformist showing in more than a decade.
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