Council Announces Reformers’ Win in Tehran

Iran’s hard-line Council of Guardians finally announced election results for this capital city’s 30 parliament seats Saturday, more than three months after the voting, declaring that 26 reformers linked to moderate President Mohammad Khatami had won along with two non-reformers.

The 12-member committee dominated by clerics annulled the results of the remaining two races and ordered that they be re-contested later this year.

In a surprise, the council also moved former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, a pragmatist who, in the February election, had become the darling of conservatives, from 30th to 20th place in the rankings of winning candidates.

The improved showing spared Rafsanjani--one of the most important figures of the Islamic Revolution--the personal humiliation of coming in last among the winners.

It could boost his now seemingly remote chances of being elected speaker of the new reformist-dominated parliament, which is scheduled to convene May 27 in a historic shift of power away from conservative mullahs.

Besides Rafsanjani, conservative Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel now finds himself headed for parliament as a representative of Tehran even though he had been out of the running in an initial vote count carried out by the Interior Ministry.

The Council of Guardians declared its winners after a long disputed recount and reexamination of more than 800 ballot boxes. In the end, it disallowed boxes containing more than 700,000 of Tehran’s 3 million votes because of what it deemed “irregularities” and vote fraud.

Nevertheless, the reformers--led by Khatami’s younger brother, Mohammad Reza Khatami--proved to have had a huge margin.

On balance, the outcome was satisfactory for the reformers in light of earlier fears that the hard-liners might move to reject the Tehran results in their entirety, analysts said.

“They can stomach this,” concluded Shirzad Bozorgmehr, editor of the English-language Iran News.

All of the big-name reformers got in, and after the runoff later this year, reformers are likely to have 28 of the 30 parliament seats from Tehran.

Overall, reformers and their sympathizers are expected to have about 200 seats in the 290-member parliament, or Majlis, with hard-line conservatives holding no more than 70 and the rest belonging to independents.

After taking over parliament, the reformers hope to loosen restrictions on the press and assert control over conservative bastions of power, such as the network of quasi-public religious and veterans foundations that dominate the economy. Eventually, they hope to influence the Council of Guardians itself, making it less conservative and allowing more political freedom in the country.

Under the constitution, the council is charged with overseeing elections and supervising legislation to safeguard the Islamic ideology of the state. Reformers charge that it has overstepped its original purpose and become a factional tool of hard-line conservatives opposed to President Khatami’s drive to increase personal freedoms and democracy.

Occurring during a turbulent period when reformers seemed to be under fire on all fronts, the snail’s pace of the recount in Tehran had caused alarm for the reformist front, a coalition of factions known as the Second of Khordad Movement.

After the election, hard-liners in the judiciary ordered the closure of virtually all reformist newspapers, a leading advisor to President Khatami was shot on the street, and hard-line-controlled state television mounted a fierce campaign against leading reformers who had taken part in an international conference in Berlin where anti-Iranian demonstrators had appeared.

All this fueled fear that hardliners on the Council of Guardians might be plotting to bar the best-known reformers, who had all been candidates from Tehran, from entering parliament.

Indeed, until a few days ago, the council had seemed inclined to keep on going through even more ballots. But Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, eventually instructed it to halt its deliberations Thursday “in the best national interest” and to certify the reformists’ victory.

Besides Mohammad Reza Khatami, the top four reformist winners included Jamileh Kadivar, the wife of Culture Minister Ataollah Mohajerani, who is one of the conservatives’ chief political targets; Dr. Ali Reza Nouri, a surgeon who is the younger brother of jailed reformist cleric Abdollah Nouri; and Hadi Husseini Khamenei, the supreme leader’s younger brother, who has allied himself with Khatami’s supporters. Also elected was a former parliament speaker, Mehdi Karrubi, who is considered to be the reformers’ top candidate for that post again.

Before the election, conservative newspapers were touting Rafsanjani as the next speaker, arguing that as a centrist he would be able to bridge the gaps between reformers and conservatives. He was the speaker before his 1989-97 presidency.

Because of his personal stature, Rafsanjani’s election to parliament this year had seemed at first a foregone conclusion.

But in the closing days of the election campaign, several reform papers mounted a campaign against him, suggesting that secret death squads targeting dissidents had been created during his presidency and that corruption had flourished. In addition, many voters said they saw him as a wheeler-dealer out of step with the prevailing thirst for change.

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