Allies of Iran’s moderate president triumphed in local elections in the capital and prevented conservatives from winning a single race, according to preliminary results Monday.
The tally from Friday’s voting for thousands of municipal council seats elsewhere in Iran may not be counted for several days.
The conservative chairman of the electoral supervision board vowed to challenge the results from Tehran.
With more than half of the votes counted Monday, President Mohammad Khatami’s loyalists won 12 of the 15 seats in Tehran, the focus of the struggle between conservatives and moderates in Iran’s Islamic government.
Independents won the other three seats in Iran’s first local elections since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
“We will definitely nullify the votes of those candidates who were disqualified by us ahead of the voting and were illegally allowed to run by the Interior Ministry,” said Mohsen Yahyavi, the head of Tehran Supervision Board.
The board, dominated by conservatives, disqualified about 50 candidates, most of them moderates, before the elections. But Khatami ruled the disqualifications illegal and instructed the Interior Ministry, which ran the elections, to allow the candidacies to stand.
Several of the front-runners in the Tehran results, including the popular former Interior Minister Abdollah Nouri, were on the board’s disqualified list.
Election officials had counted about 15 million votes, or 60 percent of the ballots, Tehran radio reported Monday.
