Moderates Head for Landslide in Iran Election

Iranian moderates swept toward a landslide victory in the Parliament, edging out several leading hard-liners and opening a path for President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s moves toward better relations with the West, the official news agency reported Sunday.

Several of Rafsanjani’s key allies captured seats in the 270-seat Majlis (Parliament), while well-known radicals such as Speaker Mehdi Karrubi placed well down in the balloting and are likely to be shut out of the seats they have used as a forum for maintaining the combative line set by the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

A total of 127 seats had been decided in the balloting as of late Sunday, with the count still incomplete for Tehran’s major bloc of 30 seats and two other seats in the countryside. Radical clerics appeared to be headed for defeat in the capital city, according to the ballots counted so far, Radio Tehran reported.

“Tehran’s early results speak of an easy victory” for Rafsanjani’s supporters, the Islamic Republic News Agency said, calling the results a “landslide” victory for the outspoken president who has angered the clerics by suggesting the adoption of a free-market economy and the development of better relations with Europe and with Iran’s Arab neighbors.

Rafsanjani’s reforms have in recent years been bogged down in the Majlis, where a hard-line majority has been able to block Cabinet appointments and water down many of the president’s key legislative programs. Only about 80 members of the last Majlis could be counted on to back the president, although he often pushed through legislation by swinging independent votes, diplomats and analysts said.

Seats in at least 68 constituencies will be decided in a runoff election because no candidates secured a majority the first time around, but results so far indicate a clear trend toward Rafsanjani’s Society of Combatant Clergymen, or Ruhaniyat.

The top vote-getter in Tehran was a popular television cleric, Ali Akbar Hosseini, a mild-mannered mullah who draws millions of viewers for his Saturday night program on Islam and the family.

Placing second in incomplete returns was Ali Akbar Abutorabi, a former prisoner of the Iran-Iraq War, who was endorsed by both the moderate and radical factions.

Also apparently elected to the Majlis were three key Rafsanjani supporters: Said Rajai Khorassani, a former ambassador to the United Nations; former Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Larijani, and Askar Oladi, a former commerce minister who speaks for the bazaar merchants who have been the backbone of Iran’s economy.

Some of Iran’s most famous militant clerics had not scored among the top 30 vote-getters for Tehran’s 30 seats among the ballots counted as of late Sunday. They included current Parliament Speaker Mehdi Karrubi; Ali Akbar Mohteshemi, the former interior minister who helped found Hezbollah, Lebanon’s militant organization of Shiite Muslims, and Musavi Khoeiniha, a spokesman for the student group that seized the American Embassy in Tehran in 1979.

Diplomats have worried that a failure of these militants to win at least a sizable minority in Parliament will force them underground. “If they don’t have a legitimate outlet of political expression, I’m going back to my bulletproof car,” one foreign envoy said.

The radicals, known as the Ruhaniyun, had bitterly complained before the election that a sizable number of their members were rejected as candidates by the Rafsanjani-dominated Council of Guardians, which rules on Islamic issues and on the suitability of public officials. The council rejected about a third of the candidates who attempted to run, most of them hard-liners, including about 40 hard-line incumbents from the past Majlis.

Hence, many complained that the outcome of the election was determined even before the voters went to the polls.

Before the election, Mohteshemi said in an interview that the radicals did not really expect to hold their majority because of the inability of many to run, but he said he would be satisfied with a sizable minority.

“We hope to keep the present majority of the revolutionary forces and the supporters of the imam’s (Khomeini’s) line. But I think really if 50-50 are to be elected it’s quite satisfying for us,” he said. “And if not, we hope to have a strong minority in the Parliament, and I will tell you that the voice of this minority will not be a low voice, and they will have the first word in the Parliament.”

The past Majlis was to have met Sunday but failed to do so because it did not have a quorum. Some Iranian political analysts speculated that hard-liners may have boycotted the session as a way of protesting the election. The session was rescheduled for Tuesday.

As of Sunday night, returns had been counted from 193 of Iran’s 196 constituencies, including all of the country except Tehran, Islamabad and Boyer-Ahamad.

In Tehran, where 170 candidates were contesting 30 seats, Radio Tehran listed preliminary vote totals Sunday night for 57 candidates. The highest-placing radical, Reza Tavosouli, was ranked 31st among them, and with final returns he and others could theoretically move up and take seats.

The new Parliament is scheduled to be seated May 28, and runoffs could be delayed several months if a quorum is elected outright in first-round balloting. That remained unclear Sunday, with many analysts predicting that only about 165 seats would be decided in the first round. If that is the case, runoffs would have to be scheduled before May 28.