Islamic conservatives hostile to President Mohammad Khatami's liberal reforms swept towards a predictable victory over shackled reformists today after a sharply reduced turnout in a disputed parliamentary election.
Interior Ministry figures showed conservatives had won at least 55 of the first 106 seats declared, out of 289 contested, an analyst at the Parliamentary Research Centre said.
Reformists had won 22, and the rest went to independents of unknown or conservative leanings. In 27 districts where no-one polled more than 25 per cent, there will be a run-off later.
Reformists branded the election rigged and many boycotted it after the unelected hardline Guardian Council banned 2,500 mainly reformist candidates, including 80 sitting lawmakers, prompting Washington to say the vote was neither free nor fair.
"Unfortunately, this was not a free election," said Mostafa Tajzadeh, a leader of the main reformist party, the Islamic Iran Participation Front, which boycotted the poll. "Our belief from the outset that the conservatives would win was proved right."
A conservative majority could spell an end to President Khatami's seven-year experiment in allowing greater freedom of speech and loosening Islamic cultural and social restrictions, a drive that hardliners have tried to obstruct at every turn.
State radio and television, keen to assert the reformist boycott had had no impact, announced a 60 per cent turnout.
The Interior Ministry issued no overall figure but a senior government official told Reuters between 20 and 22 million of the 46 million eligible voters had cast ballots.
That would put the turnout at between 43 and 48 per cent, sharply down on the 67 per cent who voted in 2000, when President Khatami's reformist allies won two thirds of the seats, but more than the 40 per cent or less that reformists had predicted.
Reformist politician Ali Shakurirad, banned from standing again, told a news conference the fact that more than 50 per cent had not voted nationwide and 70 per cent had stayed home in Tehran was a defeat for the hardline clerics.
The lowest turnout for a parliamentary election since the 1979 Islamic Revolution was 53 per cent in 1980. Under the constitution, the government does not have to resign after parliamentary elections. But the new assembly, which features many former deputies from the 1990s, may try to impeach the president's more liberal ministers, as it did in 1999.