TEHRAN, FEBRUARY 18: For the first time in two decades, Iranian voters are expected on Friday to give reformists a majority in the powerful parliament that has traditionally been a bastion of conservatism.Iran's 38.7 million voters headed to polling stations set up at mosques and schools to choose between liberals promising social and political reforms and conservatives backed by hard-liners in the ruling clergy.But turnout was very thin in many polling stations in Tehran in the first 30 minutes after voting began at 9 am. Authorities appealed to Iranians in radio broadcasts not to delay casting their votes.Supreme leader Ali Khameini, the ultimate power in Islamic Iran and the hard-liners' main backer, voted in a mosque near his office in central Tehran, and he too appealed to Iranians not to leave voting to the last minute."This is a significant election and I want you to be careful. Elect those who will be helpful to you and to Islam," he told State Tehran Radio after he voted.The hard-liners want Iran to stick to the ideals of the 1979 Islamic revolution led by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini that ousted the pro-US Shah and brought the Shiite Muslim clergy to power.Liberals have promised to work toward greater press freedom, and respect rule of law. Some have suggested that Iranians should decide in a national referendum whether or not to establish ties with the United States, a move conservatives strongly oppose. The hard-liners' stand puzzles many who were born after 1979, when relations between the two nations were severed after radical students took over the US embassy and held 52 Americans hostage for more than a year."The conservatives would like to stop all kind of contact with the outside world. They know that the more we know, the more we will dislike them," said Mehdi, a chemical engineering student, standing outside the Tehran university hostel."They think that people are ignorant and only they are intelligent," said Mehdi, who refused to give his full name for fear of reprisal.Though there are no opinion polls in Iran, reformists are expected to do well because of mounting frustration with the restrictions of clerical rule.Young people complain that 21 years of Islamic rule by Khomeini's followers and successors failed to bear the promised fruit: jobs and prosperity. Instead, youth were barred from mixing freely with the opposite sex, listening to pop and western music or watching foreign television programmes.Women were told to cover themselves from head to toe and the clergy, in its role as the interpreter of god's will, was deemed above criticism.More than half of Iran's 62 million people are under the age of 25. About 20 million of them are in high schools and universities that have traditionally been the harbingers of change and the barometers of public discontent.About 5,800 candidates including 424 women are contesting the election - both record numbers. More than 36,000 polling stations have been set up for the polls.
