President Ebrahim Raisi was killed in a helicopter crash and two candidates withdrew ahead of general elections.
Two candidates in Iran’s presidential election have withdrawn from the election as their campaigns ended the day before the vote.
Alireza Zakhani, mayor of the capital Tehran, said in a post on X on Thursday that he was withdrawing.
The first to do so was Amir Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi, 53, who withdrew his candidacy on Wednesday night and urged other candidates to do the same “so that the revolutionary front can be strengthened,” state news agency Iran-Iran News Agency reported.
General elections are being held on Friday following the death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in May. The next presidential elections were scheduled for 2025.
Hashemi served as Raisi’s vice president. He ran in the 2021 presidential election but came in last, receiving less than 1 million votes.
Al Jazeera’s Zeina Khodr, reporting from Tehran, said Hashemi’s decision to withdraw would not do much to unify the conservatives, who remain divided with two hardliners, former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and Parliament Speaker Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf, fighting for the same position.
There was an expectation that one side would pull back in support of the other, but “that didn’t happen,” Hoddle said.
Conservatives Ghalibaf and Jalili stand out as the front-runners.
Ghalibaf is a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) air force, served as speaker of parliament for four years, and was mayor of Tehran from 2005 to 2017, before serving as police chief. He ran for president in 2005, 2013 and 2017, but withdrew his vote from Raisi.
Jalili, who is Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s direct representative on the Supreme National Security Council, withdrew from the 2021 election in favor of Raisi, who won virtually unopposed.
The only reformer, heart surgeon Massoud Pezeshkian, is aligned with the previous government of President Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate who forged Iran’s 2015 nuclear deal with the world.
Khamenei has in recent days called for “maximum” voter turnout in the polls.
Khodl said Pezechkian still had a chance of winning, “but it all depends on voter turnout, and in previous elections we have seen record low numbers of people heading to the polls.”
Iran promised to open the country to the world with a nuclear deal nearly a decade ago, but since then, Israel’s war in Gaza and Iran’s first direct attack on Israel in April have left it burdened with high inflation, tough economic sanctions and a much more uncertain Middle East situation.
