Hard-Liners, Pragmatists Face Off in Iran Vote : Election: The Islamic republic’s first parliamentary race in peacetime may lead to closer ties with the West.

Iranians go to the polls today in what is widely expected to be a turning point for the Islamic republic’s 13-year-old revolution. The first peacetime election for Parliament--which also marks the first public confrontation between hard-liners and pragmatists--may signal the end of the reign of the most radical of Iran’s mullahs and the beginning of better relations with the West.

At stake is President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s plan to institute free-market reforms for Iran’s troubled economy and to lure Western technology and investment by ending more than a decade of hostile relations with neighboring Arabs and the West. Since his election in 1989, Rafsanjani’s efforts at economic and foreign policy liberalization have been stalled by a hard-line majority in Iran’s 270-seat Majlis, or Parliament.

“This is a new era,” said Said Rajai Khorassani, a former U.N. envoy and moderate candidate for the Parliament. “The existing Majlis is the Majlis which came to office during the war with Iraq. The war psychology was predominant, the priorities were different. The reconstruction period has a different political setup, different objectives, and it requires a change in attitude. We are going to see a new character, a turning point, in the thinking of the country.”

The radical clerics who presided over the 1979 takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran are not about to give way quietly, and some foreign embassies have warned their staffs to stay home today as voting begins in an election that could cost the radicals their majority in the Parliament. But results may not be available for a week.

In the era following the death of Iran’s first imam, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, former Interior Minister Ali Mohtashemi warned that the country is undergoing a period of “de-imamization” that threatens the heritage of the revolution.

“We are asking the people to continue the revolution’s path (and asking) the regime and the Islamic system to tell them that Islamic principles should be the top priority, and we are asking them to continue the imam’s path and the imam’s thoughts,” Mohtashemi said in an interview. “We don’t need any help from the U.S. Relations with the U.S. only cause destruction and are in no interest for Iran.”

The post-Khomeini leadership has taken unprecedented steps to squeeze out the hard-liners. This week, Iran’s supreme religious body, the Council of Guardians, disqualified 1,100 of the 3,150 candidates, most of them hard-liners.

Among those cut were 40 incumbents, including three who gained prominence for their role in the seizure of the U.S. Embassy, and Sadegh Khalkhali, who gained fame for publicly displaying the remains of American soldiers killed during an aborted hostage rescue attempt and for large numbers of death sentences he handed down as a judge in summary trials during the revolution’s early years.

The cuts were designed to send a message to both Rafsanjani’s opponents and the outside world that the era of revolutionary excesses is over, according to analysts and diplomats in Tehran.

The rift between Iran’s factions has become so deep that two de facto parties, still called “tendencies” here, have emerged in the run-up to the election. They are the first quasi-formal parties since the dominant Islamic Republican Party--the clergy-led group that united to purge leftist and centrist opponents of a theocracy in the first revolutionary governments--was abruptly dissolved in 1987.

The hard-liners have joined forces in the Assn. of Combatant Clerics, or Ruhaniyun, to oppose moves at privatization, opening up to foreign investment and credits from “imperialist” countries, cutting back on government subsidies and deviating from Iran’s longstanding “neither East nor West” foreign policy.

The Ruhaniyun, led by Parliament Speaker Mehdi Karrubi, is opposed to deviating from what Khomeini called “barefoot Islam” and its primary focus on the poor.

“Most poor countries that open the door economically, like Bangladesh and all of Latin America, only get more poor,” said Abolghasem Sarhadizadeh, a former labor minister now running for Parliament in Tehran.

“On foreign policy, we should continue on our own path. We shouldn’t allow the doors to open for foreign investment, although we shouldn’t close them to technology,” he added.

Not to be outdone, the more pragmatic candidates have grouped together under the misleading title of the Society of Radical Clerics, or Ruhaniyat. They support Rafsanjani’s efforts to open up on both economic and foreign policy.

Neither side, however, advocates scrapping the world’s only modern theocracy. “These are two different schools of thought fighting within the Islamic system. But no one questions the system,” explained one envoy here. “It’s not all that different from your Republicans and Democrats having different platforms or strategies while still being loyal to democracy.”

The danger for Rafsanjani and his Ruhaniyat supporters is that by backing dealings with the West, they will be branded adherents of so-called American Islam, which was anathema during Khomeini’s 10-year rule. Hence, many of the pragmatists talk up Europe but continue to take a tough line about opening up ties to the United States. None during the campaign have called into question Khomeini’s controversial death sentence against British author Salman Rushdie, whose novel “The Satanic Verses” was branded heretical by the late imam, even though the decree has been a key impediment to restoring full relations with Britain.

Iranian analysts and diplomats in Tehran expect that Ruhaniyat will win the largest share of the votes.

Yet voter apathy, particularly among the middle and upper classes, could backfire and give the edge to hard-liners. They are backed primarily by the lower classes, who tend to vote with greater interest and regularity.