Most of the results of Iran's parliamentary election are in. Supporters of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and other conservatives triumphed. Reformists, who hoped to translate widespread dissatisfaction with Ahmadinejad's rule with successes at the polls, largely failed.

The results aren't final. Some 88 races are yet to be decided in runoffs in May (winners had to take at least 25 percent of the vote to avoid runoffs). For now, here's where things stand. Parliament's 290 seats were being contested. Ultra-conservatives, most of them hard-line backers of Ahhadinejad, won 90 seats. Other conservatives who oppose reformists but also have been willing to break with Ahmadinejad's poor economic policies, won 42 seats. Independents, who vote either with conservatives or reformists, won 39 seats. Reformists won just 31 seats, and not a single seat in Tehran, supposedly a reformist stronghold. There, 19 of 20 seats went to conservatives.

Are the results legitimate? Reformists don't think so. They're raising the Florida card--the Interior Ministry, they claim, tampered with the results, as the reformists' equivalent of exit polls were suggesting that they stood to gain 10 seats. The European Union declared the election "neither fair nor free." Conveniently for the Ahmadinejad regime, the country's new year holiday begins Wednesday, closing government offices until Monday. That'll crimp reformists' attempt to challenge the result.

The runoffs could still change the outcome enough to dent Ahmadinejad's power. But those prospects are dimming, as are the reformists' hope to puncture Ahmadinejad's momentum going into next year's presidential election. Ahmadinejad also still has the full backing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nation's "Supreme Leader" and its final authority on all matters foreign and domestic.

But Ahmadinejad doesn't quite have a mandate. As The Economist notes,

The conservatives, or principlists as they prefer to be called, are far from united behind ... Ahmadinejad, who has been Iran’s president since 2005. Their divisions reflect not only policy differences, but also jockeying by Mr Ahmadinejad’s rivals in advance of next year’s presidential election. Running on a separate list from the president’s supporters, powerful principlists such as Ali Larijani, Iran’s former nuclear negotiator, attacked Mr Ahmadinejad for the alleged incompetence of his economic management, which has pushed inflation close to 20%, and for needlessly antagonising foreign powers with inflammatory rhetoric. Aware that enthusiasm for the president has waned, even among the provincial poor who make up his strongest constituency, most conservative candidates tried to distance themselves from Mr Ahmadinejad, instead emphasising their closeness to Ayatollah Khamenei.

Reformists went into the parliamentary election severely hobbled by the regime's manipulations, which dozens of members of the previous parliament off the ballot, and forbade others from organizing campaigns. Ahmadinejad, however, is still hobbled by problems of a different nature--his own conservatives' dissatisfaction and coming challenges.