Iranians are expected to turn out in big numbers on Friday for two major elections after a week of fierce campaigning between conservatives desperate to maintain their influence over the country’s political landscape and their reformist rivals seeking a comeback.

The first votes held since the landmark 2015 nuclear agreement will elect new members of Iran’s 290-seat parliament, or Majlis, and 88 clergy for the influential assembly of experts, which appoints the next supreme leader.



Initial reports from Tehran and other major cities suggested that there were long queues outside some makeshift polling stations, usually mosques, in the morning as officials urged voters not to leave voting until late hours.



Polling stations across the country received voters from 8am and were due to continue until 6pm but voting can be extended in the evening. Senior Iranian officials, including foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, cast their votes in the early hours of stations opening their doors.



A woman shows her ink-stained finger after casting her vote. Photograph: Abedin Taherkenareh/EPA

Within minutes of the start of voting, the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was seen on national television casting his vote in Tehran’s Hussainiya Imam Khomeini. “The result of people’s participation results is pride and national independence,” he said after voting. “The enemy is watching with greed and this election must be in a way that would disappoint them.”



Nearly 55 million of Iran’s estimated 80 million people are eligible to vote, according to Hossein-Ali Amiri, a senior election official at Tehran’s ministry of interior. As many as 120,000 ballot boxes had been distributed in Iran’s 31 provinces and more than 110m ballots issued, the state Irna news agency reported.

Despite widespread disqualifications during the vetting process at the hands of the powerful Guardian Council, an unelected group of clergy and jurists, there appeared to be no sign of an organised boycott.

Reformists have been pulling out all the stops to shake up a decade of conservative dominance over the two political institutions that are up for grabs on Friday. Although many of their candidates have been disqualified, they have put aside inter-party differences and formed a coalition with moderates allied with President Hassan Rouhani in order to block hardliners from entering the two bodies.

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, casts his vote. Photograph: Reuters

The coalition of candidates supported by the reformists and moderates is called “the list of hope” and activists have been busy over the course of the past week urging people to turn out in big numbers and vote for all the members on their favourite list. The first candidate on their main list is the former presidential candidate Mohammad-Reza Aref.

The leader of Iran’s reformist movement, Mohammad Khatami, who is facing restrictions on his movement and activities but is leading from behind the scenes, released a video online early in the campaign period urging political activists to unite behind “the list of hope”. His call for support created a huge momentum and opposition leaders under house arrest and a number of prominent political prisoners also sent messages asking people to vote for the list.



Khatami also cast his vote in the morning. Pictures of him voting circulated online, showing a huge crowd circulating him and taking photos. But official news agencies did not report this, observing a ban on using his name and images in the media.



On the other side, conservatives or “principlists” have formed a coalition led by Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, who has high ambitions to become the next parliamentary speaker. They have been attacking reformist candidates by portraying them as incumbents favoured by “England” and “the BBC”, which are loathed by the Iranian establishment. A campaign was subsequently launched by conservative sympathisers with the name of “no to BBC-favoured candidates”.

Iranian women stand in line at a polling station. Photograph: Ebrahim Noroozi/AP

The attacks on the BBC increased in the conservative camp after an analysis article on the corporation’s Persian service said that if fewer than half of those who voted for Rouhani in 2013 voted this time for a list of 16 moderate-leaning candidates in Tehran’s assembly election, the three main ultra-conservative leaders – Ahmad Jannati, Mohammad Yazdi and Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi – would automatically be blocked. Khamenei said afterwards that the enemy was conspiring to split voters into pro-Rouhani government and anti-Rouhani government camps.

Ali Abdi, a PhD student of anthropology at Yale University, said that split had already taken place and the reformists were seeking to bring the centre of gravity in Iranian politics from the hardline camp closer to the moderates sided with Rouhani. “On one side you have people who support the nuclear deal and the government’s plan to reduce tensions with the west; and on the other hand you have people who are opposed to the deal and do anything to harm Rouhani’s government,” he told the Guardian.

Reformists do not have many candidates standing in the assembly of experts election but nevertheless they were participating to vote for relative moderates to block hardliners, Abdi said. “That will serve as symbolic act,” he said. “It’s a sign that hardliners favoured by the ruling establishment are not supported by the people.”

Mohammad-Hossein Zia, editor of Sahamnews, an opposition website, said Friday’s elections were important because they were putting the government, which is holding the votes, face to face with ruling establishment hardliners.

Iranian election workers await voters. Photograph: Ebrahim Noroozi/AP

“The government of [Hassan Rouhani] and its supporters are on one side and the hardliners on the other,” he said. “Opposition leaders Mehdi Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi are under house arrest but have sent messages that they want people to vote because the authority that holds the election this time, meaning the government, is on their side. Only with the return of moderates to power can the government be strengthened and release of opposition leaders come true.”

It has emerged that Karroubi has asked his guards to provide him with a ballot box to vote while under house arrest.

Mohammadreza Jalaeipour, a reformist political activist now at Harvard University, said the messaging app Telegram played an important role in the campaigning period. More than 20 million Iranians are reported to be on Telegram.

Reformists were backing “a list of 233 candidates for the parliament and 77 for the assembly, even though many of them are not reformists but moderate-leaning figures”, he said.