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Conservatives ahead as first results given from Iran elections

Channel News Asia
21st of Feb 2004

TEHRAN : Religious conservatives in Iran have taken an early lead in elections for the 290-seat parliament, official sources said after the the first 50 results from Friday's polls were announced by state radio.

Officials said the results were from smaller constituencies where ballot counting has already been completed.

According to official media, partial results from several other constituencies also showed a strong showing for hardliners.

Conservatives were well-placed to win Friday's polls after the disqualification of most reformist candidates, and to add the Islamic republic's Majlis, or parliament, to the already long list of institutions under their control.

Senior figures in the regime campaigned against a call by prominent outgoing reformers for a boycott, playing on nationalist and Islamic sentiment by calling each ballot cast a "bullet into the heart" of US President George W. Bush.

Some Iranian media and several senior interior ministry election commission officials gave wildly varying estimates late Friday on how many of Iran's 46.3-million electorate had cast ballots -- the main unknown in the polls.

Iran, however, has no opinion or exit polls, and interior ministry spokesman Jahanbakhsh Khanjani said that "as long as we have not opened the ballot boxes, none of the figures being bandied around can be confirmed."

The first results on the composition of the 290-seat Majlis were due Saturday and a definitive tally not before Sunday or Monday.

The elections have capped a frustrating legislative mandate for the reformists, who captured three-quarters of the Majlis seats in 2000 with a huge wave of public support but then saw fundamentalist clerics block proposed changes at virtually every turn.

The widely-expected conservative win would leave reformist President Mohammad Khatami as one of the few moderates left in public office. His second and final term in office ends in mid-2005.

Iran's deadlocked political system has triggered growing voter apathy. While two-thirds of the electorate cast ballots in the 2000 legislative elections, less than half turned out for local polls last year.

But the regime hoped that conservatives could also bring voters out. Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivered a broadside at "the enemies (who) are trying hard to stop the people from going to the ballot boxes."

And Ayatollah Ahmad Janati, head of the powerful Guardians Council -- a hardline bastion behind the blacklist of 2,300 would-be candidates -- told worshippers that "voting is as important as praying".

Each ballot cast was like "firing a bullet into the heart" of Bush, who famously lumped Iran into an "axis of evil", he said.

Khatami also urged Iranians to vote massively -- and to "surprise" the hardliners by choosing the few reformists who were approved to stand or were not boycotting.

The main reformist party, the Islamic Iran Participation Front (IIPF) led by Mohammad Reza Khatami -- the president's younger brother -- did not take part.
The IIPF faces a dangerous political wilderness and possible retribution from the hardline judiciary, having used the Majlis as a public forum for often damning criticism of the regime and unprecedented questioning of the supreme leader.

On Friday, Janati also branded stayaways as "traitors".

The main conservative bloc expected to do well is the Coalition of Builders of Islamic Iran, a grouping presenting itself as a pragmatic force keen to get a stagnant economy moving, and not the puritanical "Taliban" that reformists are warning of.--- (AFP Files)

http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_world/view/72100/1/.html