Iran, for its part, is unlikely to grant such concessions at the best of times, let alone during a period when the system is undergoing its gravest legitimacy crisis in 25 years.
The broadest implication of the parliamentary elections is that they have dramatically underscored the failure of Iran's mullahs to graft Islamist ideology with the institutions of a modern democratic state.
For all the elections the Islamic Republic has held over the past 25 years and all the gesture politics and sloganeering revolving around the theme of "Islamic Democracy," alternations of power in the Iranian government are still determined in secret by a handful of clerics.
Iran's Interior Ministry said on Sunday that about 50 percent of eligible voters had cast ballots, down from the 67 percent turnout in the 2000 polls.
In the last parliamentary elections of 2000, walls were plastered with pictures and campaign posters as the vote captivated a country that believed it was cementing a solid agenda of reform.
One group of hard-liners running in Friday's election, the Coalition of Developers of Islamic Iran, said a ban on the use of satellite television, popular in Iran, must be enforced to guard against corruption of Islamic values and national security.
Feeds |
Contact
