President Muhammad Khatami has won a landslide victory in presidential elections which exceeds even that of his first, stunning triumph in 1997.
It is a great boost, both psychological and political, for him and his reformist followers in the power struggle that pits them against the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and the hard-line clerical establishment.
But the real question now is what he will do with his victory, and whether the conservatives, daunted by the scale of it, will ease their opposition to his reforms, or - if they don't - whether he will increase the heat on them, thereby bringing the power struggle to new, and possibly explosive, levels of intensity. That is the danger to which, after the results were announced, Ayatollah Khamenei pointed when he urged the people not to help the enemy achieve its aim of shattering national unity by speaking of winners and losers.
His advice went unheeded by the jubilant Khatami supporters who, late on Saturday night, went into the streets to celebrate. In what some saw as an ominous portent of a hardening divide, loyalist Basij militiamen came out to confront them, beating them up and smashing wind screens.
The Khatami camp never doubted that their man would win. What concerned them was the size of the turnout. In the event, with 14 million abstentions, fewer people actually voted than in 1997, even though, at 42 million, the electorate has increased by 5 million since then. That, said a researcher, shows that an everlarger number of people oppose the whole system.
Yet in spite of the lower turnout, Mr Khatami got over a million more votes than his 20 million of 1997. It all added up to a smashing blow to the conservatives.
The outcome is bound to bring enormous pressure on him to take a more combative line. Such a tremendous vote of confidence shows that the people well understood, and forgave, all the failures and setbacks of his first term, and his often abject acquiescence in them: the arbitrary arrests, unfair trials, imprisonment and dismissal of reformist ministers, high officials, journalists and student leaders; the abasement of a recently-elected reformist parliament; the massacre of the reformist press. They even overlooked his economic performance.
During his tenure, already dismal living conditions took a further turn for the worse. The conservatives seized on this as their strongest card, asserting - like the right-wing newspaper Kayhan that, according to the reformists, the unemployment of millions of Iranians, the closure of more 1,500 factories, bankruptcies, the crash of national currency, the brain drain, and so on are not important; the important thing is the shortage of freedom.
But their criticism had no impact on the electorate, which concluded, overwhelmingly, that the problem lay not with Mr Khatami, but with their own, jealous obstructionism.
It is being said that people will be much less indulgent if, in his second term, he fails to convert the vote of confidence into a more aggressive challenge to the whole structure of conservative domination. In an apparent hint that he has got the message he said that, while patience, moderation and prudence were still his watchwords, the Iranian nation, as the winner of this contest, is resolute in its just demands and expects the government and the system to take greater steps to fulfil them.
According to Muhammad-Reza Jalaipour, an editor, a new press law will again come before parliament. And this time it won't be stamped on. The Supreme Leader can't do it because he will lose all credibility. The right is losing credibility even with its own children.
In their disarray, the more reasonable, pragmatic ones are gravitating towards a centrist position; some of Mr Khatami's presidential rivals espoused at least the rhetoric of reform.