Iran's conservatives on Sunday retained control of parliament with a comfortable majority in legislative elections, despite a respectable showing by reformists who suffered heavy pre-vote vetoes.
Conservatives are expected to secure 71 percent of seats, the interior ministry announced, in a vote the European Union said was "neither free nor fair" owing to the mass disqualification of reformist candidates.
It remains to be seen how supportive the new parliament will be of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who must seek re-election next year against a background of popular discontent over Iran's high inflation. "The fact that people have again entrusted parliament to the principalists is something to be treasured," Shahabeddin Sadr, the spokesman of the main conservative coalition, told AFP.
Conservatives have won 163 seats so far in the 290-seat chamber and 54 of their candidates would compete in run-off votes next month, English-language state television channel Press-TV said, quoting the interior ministry. Reformists had won 40 seats so far, it added, meaning Iran's embattled moderates have managed to hold on to at least the same representation they had in the outgoing parliament despite the disqualifications.
Reformists hailed their performance as "remarkable" under circumstances that saw hundreds of their best candidates, including sitting MPs, disqualified by hard-line bodies for insufficient loyalty to revolutionary values.
"Despite all the restrictions ... we managed to disturb the game of our opponents," reformist coalition spokesman Abdollah Nasseri told reporters. The authorities were swift to hail turnout of around 60 percent as a "glorious" vote of confidence in the Islamic revolution, after touting the polls as a display of national unity at a time of tension with the West. "Once again, your glorious and powerful presence in the election foiled enemies' plots.
Their psychological war to make low turnout was no more than an empty bubble," said supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. However international reaction was less effusive. The pre-vote disqualifications meant "the election was neither fair nor free", said the European Union's Slovenian presidency.
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