Will Iranian voters go the moderate route?

Updated on Feb. 29 | Allies of President Hassan Rouhani, including centrists and reformers, made some gains in Iran’s parliamentary elections, while conservatives maintained many seats, according to Monday’s election results. Runoffs are needed for 34 seats in late April in areas where candidates failed to win 25 percent of the vote.

Original story:

Iranians voted in parliamentary elections on Friday in what some are calling a referendum on Iran’s signing of an international agreement to curb its nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of some sanctions, and on other moderate moves made by the current president.

President Hassan Rouhani cast his vote along with millions of other Iranians to elect members of the 290-seat parliament and 88-seat Assembly of Experts, the clerical council that chooses the next supreme leader after Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The 76 year old has been in power since 1989.

Voters referred to lists of candidates on their mobile phones or carried paper copies of campaign posters into the 53,000 polling stations around the country.

Their fingers were stained with ink to show they had voted.

All candidates were vetted by the mostly hardline Guardian Council, which disqualified thousands of candidates, most of them reformists.

Will the country of 82 million elect more moderate leaders? Analyst Aaron David Miller said don’t hold your breath.

Dealings with the Western world and, in particular, the United States raise fears in Iran and solidify the hardline stances in the country, he wrote in an opinion piece. Anti-U.S. rhetoric “remains a convenient tool to constrain would-be reformers, and even those, such as President Hassan Rouhani, who are less focused on political liberalization and more on opening up the economy.”

Ray Takeyh, senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said the results of the elections aren’t that meaningful anyway.

“In the aftermath of elections, the parliament is unlikely to act with much decisiveness and the Assembly of Experts probably will not in fact choose the next leader, but rather, rubber stamp a selection made by unelected leaders,” he said.

Saeed Leylaz, a Tehran-based political analyst, agreed that “there are powers that are bigger and more important that are outside the Assembly” that will have a much larger say on who the next supreme leader is.

Results are expected to take several days to tally. The next presidential election, in which Rouhani could run for re-election, is in spring 2017.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WyY2BJBBrY
On Friday’s PBS NewsHour, the New York Times’ Thomas Erdbrink reported on the elections from Iran’s capital Tehran.

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