DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Iran's Interior Ministry said Sunday that voter turnout in last week's parliamentary elections stood at 42.57%, the lowest in decades as the nation's economy faces intense pressure from the United States.
In comparison, turnout was nearly 62% in the 2016 elections. Turnout has consistently been above 50% since the country's Islamic Revolution four decades ago.
Voters also had limited options on Friday's ballot, as more than 7,000 potential candidates had been disqualified, most of them reformists and moderates. Among those disqualified were 90 sitting members of Iran's 290-seat parliament who had wanted to run for reelection.
Iran's hard-liners won all 30 parliamentary seats in Tehran, state TV reported Sunday.
The semiofficial Mehr news agency reported hard-liners won a majority in parliamentary elections, sweeping Tehran and other cities.
Mehr didn't give a final breakdown, saying that more than 220 out of 290 members of parliament will be hard-liners and conservatives.
Hard-liners and conservatives also dominated in Esfahan, Khuzestan, Mazandaran and several other provinces, Mehr reported.
Iran's supreme leader and other senior officials had urged people to cast their ballots Friday as a show of resistance in the face of U.S. sanctions that have plunged the economy into recession.
The elections took place under the threat of the new coronavirus that originated in China. Iran reported its first cases and deaths from the virus two days before the national polls, and many voters wore face masks as they cast their ballots.
The lower turnout is widely seen as a measure of how Iranians view their government. Some voters who chose not to cast ballots expressed apathy in the process and said the government had been unable to stymie the effects of punishing U.S. sanctions on the country.
Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli said the lowest turnout from the vote was in the capital, Tehran, with just 25.4% of eligible voters casting ballots. He said the country voted under less-than-ideal circumstances, and pointed to the spread of the virus as one example, but said nevertheless, "we believe that the number of votes and the turnout is absolutely acceptable."
A range of crises has beset Iran in the past year, including widespread anti-government protests in November sparked by a rise in prices. There were also protests after the accidental downing of a passenger jet by Iran's Revolutionary Guard amid heightened tensions with the U.S. in January. Authorities initially tried to cover up the cause of the crash.
President Hassan Rouhani had criticized the disqualification of so many moderates by the conservative Guardian Council, which is presided over by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Rouhani said the disqualification was akin to customers being told they have options but being offered just one brand at a store. Still, in the days leading up to the election, he joined the chorus of official voices urging people to vote.
Khamenei, on his official news portal, praised the "shining of the Iranian nation in the big test of the elections," while accusing a "foreign propaganda apparatus" of invoking coronavirus "to dissuade people from taking part in the elections."
"Their media did not ignore the tiniest opportunity for discouraging people and resorting to the pretext of diseases and the virus," he said in remarks from his office in Tehran.
On the eve of the vote in Iran, U.S. President Donald Trump's administration sanctioned a number of election officials, including the 92-year-old cleric who heads the Guardian Council that vets candidates. U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo slammed the election as a "sham."
Nearly 58 million Iranians, out of a population of more than 80 million, are eligible to vote. More than 24 million voted. Almost half, or 48%, were women.
State TV said that former Tehran Mayor Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, a top contender for the post of parliamentary speaker, was the top winner in the capital, with more that 1.2 million votes.
For Mohammad, a 29-year-old voting in Tehran who withheld his last name due to the sensitivities of talking to foreign media in Iran, a shift in the balance of power won't make much difference. "They're all cut from the same cloth," he said of the country's politicians. "I don't really think there's much to set them apart."
If arch-conservatives emerge victorious they'll control most branches of the state for the first time since the end of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's presidency in 2013.
"The crux of this vote is whether it will indicate the outcome for the next presidential elections, which will be more significant," said Ellie Geranmayeh, senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations.
"If the Rouhani opposition does take over parliament, they will see this as ammunition that galvanizes them, and they won't want him to have any foreign policy success in his last year," she said.
The vote took place as concerns over the virus's spread began to rise.
Starting Sunday, schools were shut down in Tehran and across 10 provinces for at least two days to prevent the spread of the virus. Authorities have stopped fans from attending soccer matches and closed movie theaters and other venues across the country until Friday. Tehran University also suspended classes and shuttered its dormitories.
Masks, sanitizers and plastic gloves have become scarce or their prices have soared in many drug stores in the capital because of high demand.
Iran is already facing diplomatic and economic isolation by Washington. The virus threatens to isolate Iran even further, with some countries now barring its citizens from traveling there.
Infected travelers from Iran have been discovered in Lebanon and Canada. Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait have effectively barred Iranians from entry, affecting thousands of religious pilgrims and businessmen. Turkey said Sunday it would close its border with Iran and halt all flights from its eastern neighbor.
On Sunday, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif joked about shaking hands with his visiting Austrian counterpart Alexander Schallenberg and told reporters: "We have to shake hands with them, don't worry I don't have coronavirus."
In his meeting with the Austrian foreign minister, Rouhani quipped that U.S. sanctions on Iran "are like the coronavirus" causing more fear than the reality, the official IRNA news agency reported. He urged Europe to resist U.S. pressure.
Schallenberg is in Tehran amid efforts by European countries to keep alive Iran's nuclear agreement with world powers. Regional tensions have steadily risen since the U.S. withdrew from the landmark deal.
Information for this article was contributed by staff members of The Associated Press and Arsalan Shahla and Golnar Motevalli of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 02/24/2020