Election day arrives in Iran with reformists well organised to seek gains

Iranians go to the polls on Friday for two major elections after a week of fierce campaigning between conservatives desperate to maintain their influence over the country’s political landscape and their reformist rivals seeking a comeback.

The first votes held since the landmark 2015 nuclear agreement will elect new members of Iran’s 290-seat parliament, or Majlis, and 88 clergy for the influential assembly of experts, which appoints the next supreme leader.

Polling stations across the country were due to receive voters from 8am until 6pm but voting can be extended in the evening. Senior Iranian officials, including the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, were expected to cast their votes in the early hours of stations opening their doors.

Nearly 55 million of Iran’s estimated 80 million people are eligible to vote, according to Hossein-Ali Amiri, a senior election official at Tehran’s ministry of interior. As many as 120,000 ballot boxes had been distributed in Iran’s 31 provinces and more than 110m ballots issued, the state Irna news agency reported.

Despite widespread disqualifications during the vetting process at the hands of the powerful Guardian Council, an unelected group of clergy and jurists, there appeared to be no sign of an organised boycott.

Reformists have been pulling out all the stops to shake up a decade of conservative dominance over the two political institutions that are up for grabs on Friday. Although many of their candidates have been disqualified, they have put aside inter-party differences and formed a coalition with moderates allied with President Hassan Rouhani in order to block hardliners from entering the two bodies.

The coalition of candidates supported by the reformists and moderates is called “the list of hope” and activists have been busy over the course of the past week urging people to turn out in big numbers and vote for all the members on their favourite list. The first candidate on their main list is the former presidential candidate Mohammad-Reza Aref.