Balance of Power in Iran Takes a Historic Turn

President Mohammad Khatami’s chief of staff said Saturday that reformist forces have won a minimum of 60% of the seats in Iran’s next parliament, in a historic shift in the balance of power in the Islamic state that he believes will allow the president to institutionalize democracy.

Mohammed Ali Abtahi added, however, that the victorious reformers allied with the moderate president do not intend to ride roughshod over their defeated conservative foes but will instead proceed cautiously so that any reforms enacted will be enduring.

Savoring an impressive victory for Iran’s reform movement--its third straight electoral landslide over the religious conservatives in three years, counting the 1997 presidential and 1999 municipal elections--Abtahi said the outcome was a testament to Khatami’s strategy of reforming the Islamic system gradually and through the rule of law.

“The successful experience of Mr. Khatami shows that speed will hurt the reforms, especially in the complex context of Iranian society,” he said.

Referring to critics who have thought Khatami too cautious in confronting the conservatives, Abtahi said, “If he had been faster, probably the result would not be what we have today.”

Interviewed Saturday evening in the presidential complex as partial election results were flooding in to the capital, Abtahi said the extent of the reformist victory was even greater than the president’s team had expected.

With about one-third of the estimated 31 million votes cast counted, it was clear that hard-line conservatives had suffered a defeat and had lost control of parliament for the first time since Iran’s 1979 revolution. The victory of Khatami’s allies came in the largest voter turnout for a parliament election in Iranian history, with about 80% of the electorate taking part.

Women, Youth Play Important Role

Interior Minister Abdul Vahed Musavi-Lari said the vote was notable because of the large number of women and young people who took part. He congratulated reformers and conservatives for conducting a “robust” but clean campaign. “All sides played according to the rules of the game,” he said.

Musavi-Lari said the election was peaceful, but the state-run Islamic Republic News Agency, or IRNA, reported unrest and riots late Saturday in at least two southwestern towns, apparently sparked by suspicions that conservative incumbents had won reelection through manipulation of the vote.

A complete tally of the vote is not considered likely for several days. In addition, a second round of voting, expected in the next few weeks, will be needed to settle several dozen races in which no candidate won a minimum of 25% of the vote.

Vote-counting was particularly slow here in the capital, where officials had to plow through handwritten ballots in which voters had written as many as 30 names of candidates to fill Tehran’s 30 seats in the 290-seat Majlis. But reform candidates said spot checks indicated that the pro-Khatami slate had fared very well.

Khatami’s younger brother, Mohammad Reza Khatami, reportedly was the leading vote-getter overall, running at the head of the ticket of the main pro-Khatami party, the Islamic Iran Participation Front.

Meanwhile, Participation Front officials said that former President Hashemi Rafsanjani appeared to be struggling in his quest for a parliament seat from Tehran. If the initial indications are borne out, the result will be a galling showing for Rafsanjani, one of the main figures of the Islamic Revolution, who had styled himself as a centrist who could build consensus between reformers and conservatives in parliament.

Rafsanjani Lost Key Endorsement

Conservatives especially had hoped to get Rafsanjani elected as parliament speaker, an office he held throughout the 1980s before becoming president in 1989.

But the Participation Front refused to endorse Rafsanjani on the grounds that he had not spoken out unambiguously in favor of Khatami’s program of greater social freedoms, and his candidacy then became a lightning rod for many of Khatami’s backers.

Unofficial returns from elsewhere in the country pointed to an overwhelming victory by the coalition of parties who lined up behind the president’s reform program.

Participation Front officials said reformists had swept all five seats in the central city of Esfahan and all five in Tabriz in the northwestern part of the country, while taking four out of five seats in Mashhad, a normally conservative stronghold in the northeast.

Out of 64 seats decided by about 5 p.m., 50 were won by pro-Khatami reformers, said Ahmad Bourqani, a leading candidate from the Participation Front. Two well-known conservatives, former Minister of Intelligence Ali Fallahiyan and hard-liner Ali Zadsar, who led a drive in parliament last year to impeach Khatami’s minister of culture, were among those defeated in the rout, Bourqani said. Even in rural areas and small towns that in the past were considered conservative bastions, reformers were reportedly ahead, capturing 57 of 95 seats, according to one estimate.

The conservatives were on the defensive for most of the campaign, having to explain why they had repeatedly foiled the popular Khatami by closing down pro-Khatami newspapers and impeaching, indicting or jailing some of the president’s key political allies over the last three years. Their attempts to shift the discussion to economic issues and to put the blame for Iran’s faltering economy on Khatami’s government went largely unheeded by voters.

Instead, the pro-reform camp turned the election into a plebiscite on whether Iranians wanted more freedom in what they read, what they say and what they do. The reform message resonated especially among women and among the 65% of the country’s population younger than 25.

The young generation has no direct memory of the Islamic Revolution, and many youths have become openly rebellious against moralistic interference in their private lives by the Islamic “komitehs,” who routinely break up private parties and denounce any female who dares to display too much hair from beneath her chador.

The conservatives felt the voters’ ire and could no longer rely on a quiescent press to protect them. As an example, Fallahiyan, who once was one of the system’s most feared figures, was forced to defend himself against a journalist’s accusations that he had set up a secret death squad that allegedly committed 80 political murders.

Reform of the Iranian justice system and passage of laws giving the press more freedom will be two of the top priorities to be addressed by the new parliament, which is scheduled to take office in May, according to several of the winning candidates.

Another expected change is that resumption of diplomatic relations with the United States will now be more easily debated, analysts said. Until now, any discussion of reopening U.S.-Iranian relations that were broken off 20 years ago has been considered taboo by the hard-line faction in parliament.

Abtahi--who said the voters’ high turnout showed they wanted a reformed Islamic system but do not reject Islamic government--offered an olive branch to the conservatives, who are expected to make up 20% to 25% of the next parliament and who still hold key positions in the judiciary and the religious establishment.

“We should not act as though this group does not exist anymore. We should recognize the reality,” he said.

Asked how Khatami was taking the news of the reform victory after three years of having his agenda limited by hard-liners, Abtahi said he sensed that the president felt a certain trepidation.

“It is a very heavy responsibility when people put their trust in you,” he said. “I saw this worry on Mr. Khatami’s face today.”