Rafsanjani allies seek unity for run-off vote

"We should use our full force to defend Rafsanjani. We should form an anti-fascist front," said Hamid Reza Jalalipour, a leader of the reformist Islamic Iran Participation Front.

Similarly, backers of Tehran ex-mayor Ahmadinejad urged conservatives to unite in support of the man who stunned Iran by almost overhauling elder statesman Rafsanjani in Friday's first-round vote.

The hard-line Siyasat-e-Ruz newspaper said conservatives could have won outright if they had settled on one candidate. "However it is not late now and there is just one step to victory ... Unity must be at the top of our agenda," it said.

Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad, with about one fifth of the vote each, just pulled clear of their five rivals in a poll damned by Washington as a travesty of the democracy Iranians yearned for.

"I just don't see the Iranian elections as being a serious attempt to move Iran closer to a democratic future," Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told Fox News television in Jerusalem.

She criticized the legitimacy of the electoral process, in which unelected clerics barred most of the 1,000 presidential hopefuls, including all the women, from standing.

Those defects prompted some Iranian reformists, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, to boycott the poll.

"As long as they (the clerical establishment) decide for people and tell people whom to vote for by qualifying and disqualifying candidates, I will not vote," she told Reuters.

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei hailed the 63 percent turnout as a slap to "ignorant enemy" President Bush.