Word: reformists
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...final round of country-wide municipal polling on Sunday evening, members of the French government claimed they hadn't heard the faintest note of voter disgruntlement. Despite a drubbing in towns and cities across France, officials in President Nicolas Sarkozy's cabinet pledged they'd continue their reformist drive with even more energy than before...
...their President. Ironically, Sarkozy's advisers also believe his imploding popularity - combined with public backing of reform - will make it all the easier for them to press ahead with unpleasant restructuring of France's economy and society. They say the eventual appearance of gain after the initial period of reformist pain may help lift the President's numbers, and leave the right well positioned for presidential and legislative elections in 2012. That could mean beautiful music for Sarkozy and his conservative allies; but it could also reflect a bad case of political tone-deafness...
...Reformist voters were more resigned. At the Hosseiniye Ershad Mosque in North Tehran, Aliyeh Mostofovi, 50, said she had come to vote although she thought the results wouldn't be to her liking. "Western countries always say we're forced to vote. I've come to show that we vote because we want to," she said...
...advisor to technocratic forces around the likes of former President Akbar Rafsanjani. "But the situation speaks for itself," he added, pointing to the fact that the Tehran candidate with the highest votes, current Majles Speaker Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, still received a million votes less than the leading reformist candidate in the movement's electoral heyday...
...Despite the result, some analysts saw the election as an exercise in getting reformist and moderate voters interested in elections again, to prepare the ground for a challenge to Ahmadinejad in next year's presidential race. Khoshchehreh even sees what he calls an "unwritten, tactical coalition of moderate conservatives and reformists" gradually fortifying into a "real, strategic coalition." These two groups are closer to each other than either is to Ahmadinejad's camp in terms of their pragmatic outlook on foreign policy and the economy. With about a third of the new parliament consisting of reformist and independent candidates, Atrianfar...