Elections in Iran Favor Ayatollah’s Allies, Dealing Blow to President and His Office

Ayatollah Khamenei has jousted repeatedly with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — as well as the two previous presidents — so the supreme leader secured this majority at Mr. Ahmadinejad’s expense.

The ayatollah will seek “to eliminate the post of president,” said Aliakbar Mousavi Khoeini, a former reformist member of the Parliament now living in exile in the United States.

“If they can get that, they will not hold the next presidential election; instead, Parliament will chose a prime minister,” he said. “Then Khamenei will essentially have everything he does approved and pushed through Parliament by his allies.”

Ayatollah Khamenei suggested last October that Iran would be better off governed under a parliamentary system in which the prime minister was chosen from members of the 290-seat Parliament. Under Iran’s byzantine electoral system, most reformist candidates were barred from running in last Friday’s election, essentially creating a contest between the two main hard-liner camps.

With 90 percent of the districts counted, Ayatollah Khamenei’s allies had won about 75 percent of the 200 seats in those districts, according to Press TV, Iran’s state-financed satellite channel, quoting the Interior Ministry.

The headline in Kayhan, the newspaper closest to the supreme leader, read, “Principalists win big.”

The Principalists are the coalition of Khamenei supporters. There are no real political parties in Iran, only murky, shifting alliances of political figures, but even the 30 seats so far headed toward a runoff election could not dent Ayatollah Khamenei’s majority. Full results are expected Monday or Tuesday, and runoff elections by next month.

The outcome, which could drastically reshape the domestic political landscape, is not expected to affect foreign policy. Ayatollah Khamenei has long pushed a confrontational stance toward with the West, particularly over Iran’s nuclear program, which is popular at home and accepted as being for peaceful purposes.

The government had repeated endlessly that a big election turnout would send a truculent message to the West at a time of heightened international tension over the nuclear program. The Interior Ministry announced a national turnout of 64 percent, prompting self-congratulation from the government.

The Foreign Ministry issued a statement on its Web site saying that by turning out in droves, Iranians “especially in this sensitive historical era, have shown that, despite all of the conspiracies, pressures, and sanctions, and the bleak portrait painted by the media of global arrogance, they will continue defending independence and the national interest.”

Noting that in previous parliamentary elections the turnout was only slightly higher than 50 percent, opposition figures questioned the Interior Ministry figure. They noted in particular that many reformist supporters had stayed home, protesting the continued house arrest of Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hussein Moussavi, leaders of the pro-democracy Green movement during the tumult of 2009.

Since the ruling mullahs had portrayed the vote as a religious duty, and since some Iranians might have voted to signal their dismay over a possible military attack on Iran, it is possible that that turnout was higher than usual, said Fatemeh Haghighatjoo, another former lawmaker living in exile, “But I don’t believe their turnout figure is correct.”

The Green movement, which demands a more transparent democracy, mushroomed in the wake of the contested 2009 presidential elections. These were the first national elections since then, but the violent suppression of that movement largely ended public protests. Also, foreign correspondents, who had once been allowed to roam freely during elections, were bused to specific polling places this time, and the government limited the number of visas issued to journalists seeking to cover the election.

A few bellwether constituencies indicated the shape of the election’s outcome. A Khamenei relative and ally, Gholamali Haddad Adel, came in first in the voting for 30 hotly contested seats in Tehran, according to results from the Fars news agency. Mr. Ahmadinejad’s sister Parvin lost in her home province of Garmsar, Mehr news reported. Khamenei loyalists even did well in rural areas and provincial cities where Mr. Ahmadinejad’s populist message once resonated, news reports indicated.