Iranian moderates win majority in parliament

A supreme leader can lead Iran in a different direction, as the post enjoys the final say in Iran’s major foreign and domestic policies.

In elections to Iran’s parliament that took place at the same time, allies of Mr Rouhani won all 30 seats allocated to the capital.

With regard to the elections for the 88-member Assembly of Experts, prominent hardliners received an embarrassing setback. A push by their supporters, largely on social media, helped eject current assembly chair Mohammad Yazdi and the ultraconservative Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, formerly a close adviser to ex-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

On Sunday they had been placed 17th and 19th in the assembly ballot for Tehran, but only 16 places were up for grabs in the capital.

The results came even after the powerful Guardian Council, a panel of clergy and jurists that vets all national political candidates and laws, rejected thousands of prominent reformist candidates.

Iranian hardliners might have lost the elections, but real change can only be judged based on the newly elected officials’ policies.

Rouhani and Rafsanjani, a former two-term president, held third and first places. Larijani won his campaign with partial support from both the reformist and the conservative camps. Iran’s relationship with America is still complex and controversial.

“If there are still some who think that the country must be in confrontation with others, they still haven’t got the message of 2013”, he said, alluding to his landslide presidential election victory on a pledge to end years of standoff over Iran’s nuclear programme and crippling sanctions.

There are no political parties in Iran and most candidates run in loose coalitions, so it is hard to give the exact breakdown of the results of Friday’s elections.

But Iran wants to be regarded as an equal partner, able to sit at the world’s top tables to work on common threats like the so-called Islamic State.

Rouhani and his allies opted to cultivate and promote a slate of relatively unknown moderate candidates that managed to slip through the vetting process.

A top Iranian cleric accused moderates of colluding with “foreigners” in the February 27 elections in order to block hard-line appointments to the Assembly of Experts.

 The election results are likely to strengthen President Rouhani’s position and could lead to continued engagement with the West, which increased after the signing of the nuclear deal in July 2015.

There will have to be run-off contests for 34 seats in late April because no one won the required 25 percent of votes cast. The results are likely to throw a hung parliament.

Bessma Momani, senior fellow at the Centre For International Governance and Innovation (CIGI), and Charles Newsome, Investec Wealth divisional director, discuss Iran’s election with Bloomberg’s Manus Cranny and Anna Edwards on “Countdown”.

“The competition is over”.

But it is noted that they could lose a majority due to the large success of the reformers, who won 79 mandates (30 of them are in Tehran).

BBC Persian’s Ali Hamedani says the economy was a key issue in the process.