Iran’s maverick President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been soundly defeated in the final round of parliamentary elections, a major setback in his high-profile power struggle with Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Ahmadinejad supporters took only 13 of the 65 seats in contention in runoff elections Friday while candidates allied to Khamenei and the Islamic Republic’s conservative clerical establishment swept 41.

That left Ahmadinejad, elected in 2005 and heading into the final two years of his second and last term, vastly outnumbered by conservatives in the 290-member Majlis, or Parliament.
He had lost heavily in the first round of voting in March to parties aligned with Khamenei.

Khamenei’s assertion of his authority and that of the conservative leadership occurred in advance of the crucial May 23 meeting in Baghdad between Iran and the Western powers it is confronting in the Persian Gulf over Iran’s contentious nuclear program.

The election results are unlikely to have any direct impact on that gathering, or on Iranian nuclear policy which is determined by Khamenei. Parliament has no control over nuclear policy.

But analysts believe that with Ahmadinejad firmly sidelined, Khamenei may feel secure enough to cut some sort of deal in Baghdad that will defuse tensions, in return for an easing of increasingly tough economic sanctions that are throttling Iran’s all-important oil exports and crippling an already bruised economy.

At a preliminary meeting in Istanbul April 13-14, the Iranians showed some signs of being prepared to make some concessions on uranium enrichment, a process crucial to developing nuclear weapons, if the United States and its allies ease off on the sanctions.

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