Iran’s Reform Bloc Claims Victory

President Mohammad Khatami today thanked Iranian voters for creating “another epic” amid unofficial indications that the country’s reform movement had trounced its conservative rivals in general elections, giving reformers control of the Islamic Republic’s parliament for the first time.

The phrase in Khatami’s official statement thanking voters for going to the polls was an apparent allusion to his own landslide election victory for president May 23, 1997, which has come to be called an “epic” in Iranian politics.

No returns were announced from Friday’s voting on state television or radio, but a member of the pro-reform Islamic Iran Participation Front said that reports reaching the party from outside Tehran showed that the pro-Khatami coalition was garnering around two-thirds of the vote.

In Tehran, where counting of the handwritten ballots was much slower because voters had to write out their choices for 30 parliament spots, the pro-reform party also was leading, the party member said, speaking from the party’s headquarters in Tehran. He asked that his name not be used.

Another hint of the Front’s dominance of the election was that state television--which is controlled by the country’s conservative faction--listed the Participation Front first among all the parties in thanking the voters for their votes.

Confident reformers close to Khatami had begun claiming victory over their conservative rivals even before the polls closed Friday, based on their own unofficial surveys and indications of a huge turnout among women and young voters.

“The avalanche is coming down,” said a buoyant Hamidreza Jalalipour, a leading reformist editor and member of the pro-Khatami Islamic Iran Participation Front. “I am sure the conservatives will lose their majority.”

“We predicted before the election that [we] would win a majority and, according to our evidence today, it seems we were right,” said the president’s younger brother, Mohammad Reza Khatami, who is heading the Participation Front’s ticket in Tehran.

Party officials quoted by news services here in the Iranian capital said they had conducted unofficial surveys at 100 polling stations across Tehran and found strong support for their slate, with reports from the provinces coming in along similar lines. Also increasing the confidence was the large turnout, which was seen as benefiting the pro-Khatami camp.

“We are seeing about 80% support in north Tehran and about 60% or more in the south,” said one party aide quoted by Reuters news agency.

At polling stations around Tehran, the turnout seemed brisk. At Marvi High School, just outside the city’s old bazaar in working-class south Tehran, many of the voters were clutching a list of Participation Front candidates’ names clipped from newspapers, which they laboriously copied onto their ballots.

A young management student who gave only his first name, Ehsan, showed his ballot with Mohammad Reza Khatami and other reformers written in at the top. He said he hoped it would be a clean sweep for the reform ticket.

“It is very important, this parliament,” he said. “If even five conservatives enter, then it will change the atmosphere.” He said he was hoping the new parliament would work for “social justice.”

The reformers have based their campaign on calls to increase press freedoms and individual liberties, and to reduce the role of the conservative clergy over people’s lives in the Islamic Republic.

Jalalipour said about 80 mullahs are in the 270-member parliament now. He said he expects that--after the vote--their numbers could be reduced to about one-fifth of that, or around 16, in the next parliament, which will have 290 members. He guessed that the conservatives in general, who now have about 120 hard-line members, will drop off by about 50%.

If reformers win, it will be their third straight election victory over the hard-line faction. Khatami won a 70% victory in 1997 against his conservative rival, and reformers also handily won elections last year to the country’s city and town councils. Khatami has managed to increase some freedoms in Iran during his term but has run into constant battles with the conservative-dominated parliament and judiciary.

Despite the early predictions, the final vote count is expected to take a week or longer because all ballots must be tallied by hand. The 39 million people who were eligible to vote were choosing among nearly 6,000 candidates nationwide.

Only candidates who win with at least 25% of the votes cast will be eligible to enter parliament after Friday’s first round. In cases in which no one gets 25%, the top two vote-getters will vie in a second-round vote, the date of which has not been announced but is expected within two or three weeks.

Jalalipour said it was significant that the reformers were doing well, given that most of the best-known figures in the reform movement--including himself--were barred from running by the Council of Guardians, a panel of conservative clerics who have the right to disqualify candidates based on their assessment of the candidates’ religious views and loyalty to the Islamic state.

With a puckish grin, the editor said he was already planning to publish in his next edition an essay addressed to the Council of Guardians that would say: “You disqualified me, and now the people have disqualified you.”