The rest of the world may be confused, but for Tehran's business community and cafe-loving urbanites, it's pretty clear who won Iran's recent parliamentary election: They did.
And judging by the mood among hard-line legislators in Iran's parliament on Monday, they know they lost. A series of outgoing conservative legislators took the podium to complain, either about the election (one alleged fraud), or President Hassan Rouhani's economic policies ("Our Islamic Revolution may be damaged," warned another).
A lot of the confusion in the West stems from trying to tot up whether reformers or conservatives gained more seats — the kind of calculation that would make sense after any election in a typical democracy. But Iran doesn't have one of those. As Bloomberg View columnist Eli Lake has pointed out, some candidates in the supposedly reformist camp look very conservative.