Parliamentary election in Iran 2008

The 2008 parliamentary elections in Iran took place on March 14, 2008 and ended with a victory for the conservative forces.

prehistory

Three political blocs vied for a majority in parliament .

The "principled" (a reservoir for conservatives and radical Islamists ) are the camp around the president. Its supporters include the Iranian military. The commander in chief of the armed forces as well as the commander in chief of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard expressed their support for the principled in the run-up to the election.
The “critical conservatives” under the former chief negotiator at the International Atomic Energy Agency , Ali Larijani , who takes a critical position on Ahmadinejad's policies.
The reformers around Ayatollah Akbar Hāschemi Rafsanjāni and Mohammed Chatami form the third block. They appealed to the Iranians to take part in the election in order to prevent those you do not want from returning to parliament. The reformers are striving for a relative liberalization and opening of the country towards the West. With their demands, however, they move within the political system, which they do not want to change.

In the run-up to the elections, candidates were pre-selected by the Guardian Council . Candidates whose political views did not suit the conservative-clerical leadership or whose candidacy, in the opinion of the Guardian Council , was incompatible with the Islamic principles of the state and the rule of the Supreme Legal Scholar were excluded from the election. This approach is characteristic of every election in the Islamic Republic and is portrayed in Western media as the country's major democratic deficit.

As Bahman Nirumand writes, "the direct interference of the revolutionary leader Ali Khamenei, who recommended that voters elect candidates who support the government of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad," was unique in the history of the Islamic Republic of Iran .

In the 2008 parliamentary elections, 7,597 people wanted to run for the 290 seats in the Majlis . From the movement of reformers , only around 100 of around 900 applicants were admitted. In a first pre-selection, 5,000 candidates were recognized by regional election commissions of the Guardian Council, and in a second round a further 2,000 candidates were disqualified. In a final round, the Guardian Council then qualified some of the disqualified and re-disqualified some, so that 4,755 candidates took part in the elections.

Despite the preselection of candidates, the election was seen as a test election for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's policies and the Iranian presidential election in 2009. More than 43 million Iranians were called to vote.

Result

The first results came from the constituency of Qom . There, the former chief negotiator at the IAEA , Ali Larijani , convincingly beat the candidates from President Ahmadinejad's camp. According to unofficial reports, he should have received over 75% of the vote. Larijani was nominated President of Parliament on May 26, 2008 with 161 votes from the camp of principled and critical conservatives , his predecessor Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel received 50 votes.

The runoff election on April 26, 2008 decided on a further 82 parliamentary seats in which the applicants did not receive an absolute majority in the first ballot. The turnout was 26% in the runoff election and around 60% in the first election.

	Seats	percent
Principles	117	40.3
critical conservatives	53	18.3
reformer	46	15.9
Independent	71	24.5
Armenian minority	2 * to the independents
Chaldean and Assyrian minority	1
Jewish minority	1
Zoroaster	1
total	290	100