By Safa Haeri, IPS Editor

PARIS 2 Mar. (IPS)           Six years after having swept him to power in a surprise landslide victory, Iranian voters repeated their exploit, this time in standing out en mass from the city council elections that were held on Friday.

         According to the latest results, only about ten per cent of the Tehran voters went to the polls, while the percentage of the abstention throughout the nation was about eighty per cent, the lowest of any elections ever held in the history of the Islamic Republic.

         These results are not calamitous only for the embattled President Mohammad Khatami and the reformists, but place under question the very legitimacy of the present Iranian regime, where the clerical rulers insists that the number of people taking part in the elections is a prove of the popularity of the Islamic Republic”, noted Mr. Ahmad Zeydabadi, an independent journalist close to the Nationalist-religious group.

         He, like many other Iranian analysts, agrees that the results from the Friday elections was “surprising”, as, since the election of Mr. Khatami in May 1997 to the presidency, this is the first time that the reformists he leads are being defeated so badly, so bluntly, so humiliatingly.

         “It is time for Mr. Khatami and the reformers to accept their defeat and agree that their policy of reforming the regime from within has not worked, that the people are deceived, that they have despaired from reforms being ever implemented, that the regime is not reformable. It is time for them either to resign or to change their political line in a radical way, if they want to recapture the confidence of the people”, said Mr. Ahmad Salamatian, a leading analyst based in Paris.

            But Mr. Zeydabadi believes that “no matter how fast the reformers would have to run, but the demands of the people are so radicalized that they could never catch it”.

         For many analysts, the Friday elections proves what Dr. Qasem Sho’leh Sa’di, a former Member of the Majles had coined more than a year ago by pronouncing as “dead” the reform movement.

         “The reform movement, as it is now, is dead and the official reformists, meaning those who try to remain in the leadership are finished. With Mr. Khatami having proved not being a general for the battler against the ruling conservative, retreating trench after trench, the road is open for neo reformers who call for radical changes in the regime”, Mr. Sho’leh Sa’di had told Iran Press Service before his departure for Tehran, where he had been arrested at the airport and transferred to the notorious Evin prison.

         In the first city council elections, Hojjatoleslam Abdollah Noori, a former Interior Minister and advisor to the President was elected to Tehran’s city council with more than half a million of votes, while this time, Mr. Mehdi Chamran, a relatively unknown personality who led a list named Builder of the Islamic Iran, backed by the conservatives, received less than 200.000 votes, observers noted.

         “For six years, people have constantly voted for Mr. Khatami and for the reformists. They gave them the Executive and then the Legislative, then the first city councils, but got nothing in response but empty promises, their votes having been used for the prestige of the reform movement”, Mr. Zeydabadi further observed.

         For Mr. Salamatian,, the fact that eight per cent of Iranian voters have deserted polling station is a “very serious warning” to both President Khatami and the reformists who, in his words, have, in the past six years, “but deceived the people”.

         “Not only the reform movement has lost the confidence of the people, but with the Friday resounding defeat, it has become more fragile, should the conservatives profit from their victory to redouble their assaults against the reformists”, he told the Persian service of the BBC.

            For many Iranian analysts and observers, the gap between the President and the reformists with the aspirations of the people is now so deep that hardly the reformers could bridge it.

         In fact, on Saturday, and as the first results was showing the defeat of the reformist candidates, the Office for Consolidating Unity, the Iranian students largest union announced that it is getting out of President Khatami’s Second Khordad Coalition Movement.

         Explaining the dramatic move, one of the leaders of Office said the reformists, or the president, could “no longer” respond to students demands for the “radical changes necessary to equip Iran with tools of democracy and freedom”.

         “It is time for us to join other forces that, like us, are looking for changes, not reforms, are calling for a secular regime, not a lifted up theocracy, as Mr. Khatami wanted”, the student said on condition of anonymity.

         In an interview with the Persian service of Radio France International, Mr. Mohsen Sazegara, the secretary of the newly formed National Coalition of Iranians for Freedom (NCIF) said in order to “force” the ruling clerics to yield to demands for a democratic, secular system, he was moving towards mobilizing the people around the idea of civil disobedience and the first step in that direction was to attract the students.

         The outcome of the last electoral exercise in Iran is bound to also affect the relations of the outside world, particularly the European Union, with the Islamic Republic, some analysts predicts. ENDS CITY COUNCIL ELECTIONS 2303