7 Conservatives, 5 Reformists in Final Formation of Parliament’s Governing Board

The moderate conservative MP and the long-serving speaker of Iran’s Parliament, Ali Larijani, was once again elected as the Speaker. In a poll at the open session of the parliament, Larijani secured 237 out of 276 votes.

The Vice Speakers and members of the governing board were also elected in the session. Two reformists and moderates, Masoud Pezeshkian and Ali Motahari, were respectively elected as the First and Second Vice-Speakers.

Both vice-speakers are members of the Faction of Hope, the camp of reformists and pro-government MPs in the new Parliament.

In a preliminary vote on Sunday, Larijani beat the leading reformist Mohammad Reza Aref, causing him to drop out of the race for the conclusive elections held on Tuesday.

Motahari was also defeated, ranking third in the preliminary polls for the post of Vice-Speaker, and was not elected on Sunday. However, he decided to run again in the Tuesday votes, and managed to secure enough votes to become the 2nd Vice-Speaker, beating his conservative rivals.

Mohammad Qassim Osmani, Behrouz Nemati, and Mohammad Ashoori Taziani were the three MPs who were elected both on Sunday and Tuesday as the observers of the board. Osmani is a reformist, and the two others are conservatives.

Reformists managed to increase their votes in the other six seats in Tuesday elections. Two conservatives, Nasser Mousavi Largani and Abdolkarim Hosseinzadeh, had been elected in the Sunday votes as two of the six secretaries of the board; however, the reformist MPs Mohammad Ali Vakili and Ali-Asghar Yousefnejad defeated them in the Tuesday votes, adding to the weight of the reformists.

The other four seats for the secretaries were claimed by the conservative MPs Gholam-Reza Kateb, Amir Hossein Qazizadeh Hashemi, Akbar Ranjbarzadeh, and Ahmad Amirabadi Farahani.

Overall, conservatives seem to outnumber the reformists by 7 to 5 if Larijani and Nemati are counted in the list of conservative MPs. However, they were both listed by the reformists in the List of Hope during the February elections, and have subsequently joined the Velayat Faction [the conservative faction in Parliament].