Iranian voters have dealt a humiliating blow to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, their hardline president, by spurning his supporters in elections for local councils and a clerical assembly, final results confirmed today.

The twin rebuffs are viewed as a clarion call for him to moderate his confrontational foreign policy that has brought Iran to the brink of UN sanctions and to focus more on economic woes at home.

"The government has been shocked by the people’s decision," proclaimed E’temad-e Melli, a reformist newspaper.

The main winners in the local government elections were "moderate conservatives", while reformists staged a morale-boosting comeback after a series of heavy electoral defeats.

Mr Ahmadinejad’s fundamentalist supporters, among them his sister, Parvin, won just three out of the 15 seats on the Tehran City Council.

Seven seats went to moderate conservatives supporting the mayor, Mohammed Bagher Qalibaf, a bitter rival of Mr Ahmadinejad. Reformists won four.

None of Mr Ahmadinejad’s candidates won seats on the councils in the cities of Shiraz, Bandar Abbas, Sari, Zangan and Kerman. Women also fared better than in previous years, forming almost half those elected in several city councils.

The rout of fundamentalists was echoed in results for the Assembly of Experts, a clerical body empowered to appoint and dismiss the country’s supreme leader.

The runaway winner of last Friday’s vote was Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a wily former president and moderate conservative who favours accommodation with the West.

He secured twice as many votes as Ayatollah Mohammad Taqi Mesbah-Yazdi, a firebrand, anti-Western cleric who is regarded as Mr Ahmadinejad’s spiritual mentor.

The results will please Iran’s traditional old guard, spearheaded by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, who strives to keep a balance between the Islamic Republic’s competing factions. The West will also hail the evidence of growing disillusionment with Mr Ahmadinejad.

The outcome of the Assembly of Experts vote was a stunning reversal of fortune for Mr Rafsanjani who was resoundingly defeated by Mr Ahmadinejad in last year’s presidential elections.

"The people’s vote for Rafsanjani meant they hope he will create and improve the moderate line," Amir Mohebbian, a political analyst and columnist for Resalat, a conservative daily, said.

Mr Rafsanjani, now effectively leader of the opposition, is likely to serve as a lightning rod for the dissatisfaction felt among the traditional old guard and reformists with the president’s policies at home and abroad.

University students last week chanted "Death to the dictator" in an unprecedented show of open hostility to the president who was hosting a conference of Holocaust deniers in Tehran.

"Forget the Holocaust - do something for us," they chanted in a reference to high unemployment and his government’s stifling of academic and other freedoms.

Traditionalists have recently prevented the regime tipping in favour of the reformist faction by using a conservative vetting body to disqualify liberals from running for elected office.

This time, the watchdog panel barred some fundamentalist hopefuls from standing for the Assembly of Experts, among them Ayatollah Mesbah-Yazdi’s son.

Many are now predicting a coalition between reformers and moderate conservatives to oppose Mr Ahmadinejad and his hardline allies in the next parliamentary and presidential elections.

The hardline Resalat newspaper urged soul-searching to avoid future defeat. "The election was a good opportunity for us to recognise our pitfalls. If we don’t make the best use of this we will fail in the future as well," it said.

Whether Mr Ahmadinejad is temperamentally capable of changing tack is moot.

Oozing self-confidence, he shrugged off the embarrassing setback by portraying the higher than expected voter turn-out of 60 per cent as a vote of confidence in Iran’s Islamic system. This would help Tehran confront its Western enemies, he declared.

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