New York Times
THOMAS ERDBRINK
Five days after national elections in Iran, the Interior Ministry has yet to release official detailed results, and some analysts are beginning to doubt that it ever will.
While the government and its supporters clearly won a sweeping victory in the capital, the picture in the rest of the country is much more diffuse and may remain that way for some time, if not permanently.
Iran’s Interior Ministry, which is overseeing the voting for the 290-seat Parliament and the clerical Assembly of Experts, announced on Tuesday the names of 222 parliamentary candidates who won nationwide. It also announced that there would be a second round of voting for 68 seats in several constituencies in April.
But there has been no official comment on the affiliation of the winning candidates, and there may never be, making it difficult to determine how many seats the various factions have won.
A consensus seems to be developing — based on the most credible news media efforts at a tabulation — that the reformist-moderate combination seems to have secured 80 to 90 seats in the Majlis, or Parliament. The hard-liners seem to have won a similar number. Around 60 seats have gone to independents, and the rest will be determined in the second round of voting.
The problem is that there are no parties in Iran, only individual candidates and temporary, loose alliances. This makes it extremely complicated to count which person supports which faction. One famous politician, for example, Ali Motahhari, came in second in Tehran on the combined list of government supporters. But when it comes to social issues like the obligatory Islamic head scarf for women, he will probably side with the hard-liners.
“In the end, all the members of the Parliament are free to choose their own positions,” said Farshad Ghorbanpour, a political analyst close to the hard-liners. “We expect most of our supporters to help the government, at least on economical issues.”
What seems likely is that the new Parliament will find itself without a dominant faction, a rarity in the Islamic Republic. Analysts expect that even the second round will not bring a majority to any of the groups. This could lead to gridlock, experts say, because under Iran’s Constitution, laws need a two-thirds majority for passage. Factions can obstruct the votes simply by not showing up.
In the absence of official results, Iranian news outlets, many aligned with one of the factions, have been making their own calculations, announcing victory for their respective patrons.
A moderate newspaper, Arman, in many ways a fanzine for Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president, ran cheering headlines saying their favorite ayatollah came “out on top,” after he attracted the most votes in the assembly election. Underneath they printed a picture of a grinning Ayatollah Rafsanjani, known as “the shark” in Iran because of his relatively smooth face and absence of facial hair.
The state newspaper, Kayhan, a mouthpiece of Iran’s hard-liners, dismissed claims by the reformists and moderates of a huge victory, with a front-page headline on Monday screaming “Big lie!” In an editorial, the paper claimed that the hard-liners had won 153 seats in Parliament, a clear majority. The reformists, it said, “seem to have discovered a new form of mathematics.”
President Hassan Rouhani, following the official line, has not disclosed the number of seats he thinks were won by the different factions. He did write a letter to the interior minister on Wednesday thanking him for conducting “glorious elections.” The vote, the government news agency IRNA wrote, quoting from a statement by Mr. Rouhani, was “a brilliant new chapter in the record book of religious democracy.”
The semiofficial ILNA news agency said the reformist-moderate coalition had won 83 seats, and put the hard-liners at 78 seats. It said the rest were independents or were headed for the second round of voting. But the agency’s count, like all the others, was unofficial, it noted.
“Clearly the hard-liners have won, we have 115 seats,” concluded Hamidreza Taraghi, a hard-line political analyst. “We will be the dominant faction.”
A political opponent concluded the opposite. “The reformists and moderates have 130 seats, more than everybody,” argued Mr. Ghorbanpour, the political analyst close to the Rouhani government. “We will set the agenda.”
