TEHRAN, 17 March 2008 — Conservatives won a majority in Iran’s parliamentary vote, state television said yesterday, but the new assembly may still give President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a tougher time ahead of next year’s presidential election. The president’s reformist critics had tried to capitalize on public discontent over inflation in the world’s fourth-largest oil producer but many of their leading candidates were disqualified from the race.

State-owned Press TV said the conservatives have taken at least 163 seats in the 290-member assembly against 40 for the reformists so far.

The English-language satellite channel, citing the Interior Ministry, said most votes had been counted. Some seats would go to run-off votes and some winners were classified as independents.

Iranian officials have hailed the election as a victory over the US, the Islamic Republic’s arch-foe, which on the day of voting on Friday called the results “cooked.”

But the European Union, whose main members back the US in an escalating standoff with Tehran over its disputed nuclear plans, said the election was “neither fair nor free.” The Guardian Council, a body of clerics and jurists, barred many reformists when it screened potential candidates on criteria such as commitment to Islam and the clerical system.

The 27-nation EU “expresses its deep regret and disappointment that over a third of prospective candidates were prevented from standing in this year’s parliamentary elections,” its presidency said in a statement issued in Brussels.

‘Victorious’

Iran’s Interior Ministry, which supervised the vote, said a final nationwide tally might not come out until today.

But even if the conservatives’ victory is confirmed, analysts said divisions among politicians ranging from radical backers of Ahmadinejad to his more pragmatic critics could widen as they jockey for position before the 2009 presidential race.

Reformists, who seek political and social change, and some conservatives have accused the president of stoking inflation, now at 19 percent, by lavishly spending Iran’s windfall oil revenues on subsidies, loans and handouts.

“You could have a possibility of some of the conservatives making a coalition with the reformists and making it difficult for the president to pass his bills,” one Iranian analyst said.