Tehran – Iran’s first runoff race for president was shaping up as a slugfest Monday as reformists lined up behind a front-running pragmatic statesman and Islamic clerics who back Tehran’s hard-line mayor halted publication of a liberal newspaper.
Responding to complaints of fraud in last week’s first round, the supervisory Guardian Council agreed to a recount of a random sample from the provinces of Tehran, Qom, Mashhad and Isfahan – a tiny portion of Iran’s 42,000 polling stations. State TV reported later Monday that the council had pronounced the results final, launching the two leading vote- getters on the hustings for the runoff ballot Friday.
Moderate parties and liberal students offered support to Ayatollah Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president who has veered between the strict religious and reformist camps during his career.
Reformers said they had to defeat his opponent, the unabashedly hard-line Tehran mayor, Mahdi Ahmadinejad.
The liberals’ move was in sharp contrast to last week, when they demonstrated in Tehran, calling for a boycott of the presidential vote and saying the election would not lessen control by clerics.
The boycott appeared to have an effect. Turnout was below 50 percent in Tehran, compared with 63 percent nationwide, and Ahmadinejad topped the polls in the capital.
Iranian analysts, who were stunned by Ahmadinejad’s finishing barely behind Rafsanjani, said the runoff was too close to call. Rafsanjani, the president in 1989-97, won 21 percent of the votes, while Ahmadinejad got nearly 19.5 percent.
Rafsanjani picked up support from two major reform parties – the Executive of Construction Party, led by the brother of outgoing President Mohammad Khatami, and the Islamic Revolution Mujahedeen Organization.
Accusations of vote rigging in the first round lingered.
Mahdi Karroubi, a former parliament speaker who finished third, just two-tenths of a point behind Ahmadinejad, accused the Revolutionary Guard of strong-arming voters and rigging the results in at least four provinces.
On Monday, Karroubi resigned as an adviser to Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In a letter, he urged Khamenei to investigate the allegations of vote-rigging and guarantee the Revolutionary Guards do not interfere in the runoff.
The reformist newspaper Eqbal intended to print the letter Monday, but the cleric-controlled judiciary blocked publication.
