TEHRAN, Iran — Hard-liners have defeated a compromise plan to resolve Iran's election dispute and allow a free vote to take place on Feb. 20, a top Iranian lawmaker said Thursday.

Mohammad Reza Khatami, vice speaker of parliament, said the Islamic Iran Participation Front, the country's largest reform party, would maintain its boycott of the parliamentary elections. Khatami, President Mohammad Khatami's brother, is the party's leader.

"The previous trend has continued. The Feb. 20 elections will not be legal and free. My party will not participate in this election," Khatami told reporters.

Under the plan announced Wednesday, the Intelligence Ministry was to review the list of 2,400 reformist candidates who have been disqualified by the hard-line Guardian Council. Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ordered the ministry, which is led by reformists, to conduct the review.

"The Intelligence Ministry had to provide the list to the Guardian Council as a legal formality, and the council was required to forward that list to the Interior Ministry without any intervention," Reza Khatami said.

Instead, the Guardian Council approved only 51 of a list of 600 names endorsed by the Intelligence Ministry, he said.

"The compromise has failed. The Guardian Council has interfered after the Intelligence Ministry approved 600 candidates who were previously disqualified," he said.

Reza Khatami said President Khatami had told Khamenei what happened. The Guardian Council is appointed by Khamenei, a fact that has lead some reformists to accuse the supreme leader of quietly approving of the council's actions.

Khamenei's commissioning of the Intelligence Ministry had been welcomed as an indication that the matter would be taken out of the hands of hard-line Guardian Council.

The disqualifications, representing about a third of all candidates, had been widely criticized. President Khatami and his Cabinet had said they could not go along with elections staged under such conditions. Reformist legislators demonstrated daily last month and 124 of them resigned in protest a few days ago.