Iran Elections

Iran's hard-line Council of Guardians finally announced election results for this capital city's 30 parliament seats Saturday, more than three months after the voting, declaring that 26 reformers linked to moderate President Mohammad Khatami had won along with two non-reformers. The 12-member committee dominated by clerics annulled the results of the remaining two races and ordered that they be re-contested later this year.

Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, on Thursday ordered the hard-line council overseeing parliamentary elections to stop questioning the validity of ballots and accept the landslide win by reformers in the all-important Tehran district. Khamenei's decision ends months of infighting over results of the Feb. 18 election and clears the way for a historic shift of power in the new parliament to reformers, who wish to move the Islamic regime toward increased democracy and civil liberties.

Iran's reformers won 52 of the 66 seats contested in runoff legislative elections, the nation's largest pro-democracy party said Saturday. The reformers' victory was seen as yet another setback for Islamic hard-liners fighting change. The runoff was held three months after allies of Iran's reformist president won nearly 75% of the seats decided in the first round of voting for parliament, or Majlis.

Iranian voters cast ballots Friday in a runoff election to determine 66 seats in parliament, but the major issue was whether the recent closure of newspapers and jailing of activists would thwart the country's movement toward reform.

A series of mortar shells ripped into northern Tehran on Monday, landing near Iran's national police headquarters and reportedly injuring six people in an attack claimed by the Moujahedeen Khalq group, which opposes Iran's Islamic government. The explosions seemed bound to add another element to the political tensions brewing in Iran.

A would-be assassin, reportedly riding a powerful motorcycle of a type restricted by law to police and security agents, on Sunday shot and seriously wounded one of Iran's leading reformist politicians and newspaper editors on a Tehran street.

Former Iranian president and conservative standard-bearer Hashemi Rafsanjani scraped into the new parliament today, state television said. Iranian TV, monitored by the BBC, said Rafsanjani had won the last of 30 seats for the capital, Tehran, with 25.587%--just over the threshold needed to claim a seat without a runoff. The last of the results of the Feb.

Officials on Thursday delayed releasing final poll results for Tehran amid allegations of vote-rigging in a tight race for the last of the capital's 30 parliamentary seats. Officials said they were investigating charges that 100 ballot boxes were stuffed with fraudulent votes. Another 100 boxes had yet to be counted out of a total of 3,111 across the city, they said. "Some ballot boxes are being recounted. Protests have been made against alleged vote-rigging . . .

Iran's exercise in democracy during last week's parliamentary election has prompted an intriguing reaction among the Persian Gulf state's Arab neighbors: unadulterated envy. In country after country, commentators have been asking: Why don't we have the same thing?

Iranian conservatives blamed themselves and "a wave of lies" in the media for their stunning defeat at the hands of reformists in last week's parliamentary election. "The poor showing of the right-wing candidates was due to a coordinated campaign by reformist newspapers and foreign radio stations. A wave of lies is responsible for this situation," departing hard-line parliament member Kamal Daneshyar told one newspaper.