Hard-Line Figure In Iran Runoff

In an election season that brought slick, Western-flavored campaigning to Iran, Ahmadinejad's pitch stood out for its austerity. His campaign posters were printed in black and white. A half-hour television special dwelled on the modesty of his home, a traditional Iranian house furnished with only a chair at the desk he shared with his father. "Where's the swimming pool?" the narrator asked. Several voters had described him as refreshingly authentic.

Still, analysts expressed surprise at the mayor's second-place finish.

"It's one thing for Tehranis to have an affinity for him, especially south Tehran," a working-class area, said Karim Sadjadpour, resident analyst for International Crisis Group, a Brussels research group. "But in Isfahan? Shiraz? Yazd? He was close to second even before the Tehran votes were counted."

There were indications that hard-liners chose to mobilize for Ahmadinejad to avoid splintering the vote. Three days before the election, Khamenei's representative to the Revolutionary Guard urged loyalists to vote for the candidate with the least pretentious campaign.

"They have mobilized their forces to vote for him," said Farzaneh Firozi, 38, after casting her ballot, for Moin, in Tehran. "Everyone at the polling station was talking about it. All the women with me, all the ones in chadors, were all voting for Ahmadinejad."

The election night drama was fueled by a dispute between the hard-line Guardian Council, one of three clerical bodies that oversee the elected government, and the Interior Ministry, an arm of the elected reformist government. The council's operatives monitor the voting, but the process is officially conducted by the Interior Ministry.

After the polls finally closed at 11 p.m. Friday, vote tallying was proceeding normally in the early hours of Saturday morning. For several hours, the totals reflected preelection polls and exit surveys. With a third of the votes in, Rafsanjani held a firm lead, and Moin was a solid second. But no vote totals were released to the public.

At 5 a.m., Ahmadinejad began to surge ahead. Interior officials expressed quiet surprise, but a Guardian Council spokesman publicly announced the preliminary total.

That sent President Khatami rushing to the Interior building. Before cameras, he upbraided the Guardian Council for butting in.

At a news conference, Karrubi declared, "Some centers of power are violating the law and are trying to get more votes for a particular person with the help of the Guardian Council.

Interior and Guardian Council officials also differed on turnout. While interior officials slowly moved their estimate toward 60 percent, a Guardian official claimed it approached 70 percent -- comparable to the turnout when Khatami was reelected four years ago.

The turnout figure is of intense interest to Iran's clerical establishment, which casts voter participation as an endorsement of the system it guides. Some reform advocates had supported a boycott of the vote, saying such a move would highlight the need for fundamental changes in a system whose top leaders are unelected.

The stakes grew even higher this week after President Bush issued a statement on the eve of the vote saying that Iran's electoral process "ignores the basic requirements of democracy." State television cast the White House statement as a taunt, saying Bush had declared that the vote of Iranians did not count. Numerous voters said the statement prompted them to vote.

"The timing was poor," Sadjadpour, the analyst, said of the statement. "It was spun here, and it really benefited the regime."

Karrubi's strong showing surprised many observers. The moderate cleric was speaker in the last reformist parliament, but lost his reelection bid and barely registered on preelection polls for president.

One analyst said the likely reason for Karrubi's strong finish was the cash offer he made the centerpiece of his campaign: $60 a month to every citizen older than 18, in a country where the economy is by far the top issue and per capita income is $2,000 a year.

"People were ashamed of saying they would vote for someone for that reason," the analyst said on condition of anonymity because his employer had not authorized him to speak. "People lied."

Special correspondent Mehrdad Mirdamadi contributed to this report.