"It's a fraud," said one female Mousavi supporter, who declined to give her name. "I can't believe it. Last night we celebrated victory. And this morning Ahmadinejad was the winner."
On a side street near northwest Tehran's Mohseni Square, a group of helmeted hard-line Ansar-e Hezbollah militiamen on motorcycles rhythmically beat their batons on their riot shields as they prepared to attack a gathering crowd.
"God is great!" they chanted. "God praise Hezbollah!"
After midnight in the Jordan neighborhood, motorcycle riot police in body armor chased protesters and passersby, striking men and women. Teary-eyed teenagers fled, clutching their backs or arms in agony.
"They broke my head! They broke my head!" one man screamed as he ran, gripping his bloodied forehead.
The pop-pop-pop of tear-gas canisters could be heard amid the chaos. Police officers dragged demonstrators into waiting vans.
Some protesters fought back fiercely. For at least 15 minutes, Ansar-e Hezbollah militiamen and young men fought for control of a pedestrian bridge over a major highway. At one point a group of militiamen surrounded a fallen protester and began pummeling him with their batons. A hail of rocks forced them into retreat.
Along the highway beneath the bridge, drivers stopped their cars, leaned on their horns and shouted slogans in support of the protesters.
On Vali Asr Street, another main road, cars began beeping their horns in the rhythm that had become the unofficial signal of the Mousavi campaign during boisterous weeks before the election Friday.
Over the last six presidential and parliamentary elections, moderate candidates fared well during times of high turnout while conservatives tended to win during low turnout. In 1997 and 2001, with high voter participation, Mousavi ally Mohammad Khatami coasted to victory over conservative rivals with about 70% of the vote, while Ahmadinejad received 62% of the vote amid a tepid 48% turnout in 2005.
His victory this year with 80% turnout would suggest that many of those who stayed home or voted for his opponent last time voted for him this year, a scenario analysts consider unlikely.
The results also showed Ahmadinejad winning the city of Tabriz, where a large urbanized Azeri population was believed to strongly support Mousavi, an Azeri who drew huge crowds at rallies.
The electoral commission also defied its own rules by certifying the vote before alleged irregularities were resolved.
Local news reports did not mention the protests or the claims of fraud by the Mousavi campaign.
The vote suggests a further consolidation of power by hard-line elements of the country's security forces and the Revolutionary Guard, which back Ahmadinejad, over clerics such as Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, who were pillars of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and criticized by the president as corrupt during the campaign.
The Revolutionary Guard issued a statement two days before the election warning that it would crush any popular rebellion.
Now that he's won a second and final term, some suggested that Ahmadinejad might jettison the hard-line supporters he needed during the elections, moderate his rhetoric and policies and move to the center. But many say his rigid personality and ideological fervor make him incapable of making such a shift.
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daragahi@latimes.com
