DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Iran will hold a runoff election to decide the successor to its late hardline president. Ebrahim Raisi“Victory is assured,” officials said Saturday after polls in the Islamic Republic saw the lowest voter turnout ever and saw the top candidates fail to win.
This Friday’s election will pit reformist candidate Massoud Pezeshkian against hardline former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili.
Election spokesman Mohsen Eslami announced the results at a press conference carried by Iranian state television. He said Pezeshkian received 10.4 million votes and Jalili 9.4 million out of 24.5 million cast. Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf won 3.3 million votes. Shiite cleric Mostafa Pourmohammadi received more than 206,000 votes.
Under Iranian law, a winner must receive at least 50 percent of the total votes; if not, the top two candidates advance to a runoff election a week later. Iran’s history has seen only one runoff presidential election, in 2005, when hardline candidate Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defeated former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Eslami acknowledged that the country’s Guardian Council still needed to give its formal approval, but the results were not immediately challenged by the candidates.
As has been the case since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Women and People Seeking Radical Change Candidates are barred from running, and the vote itself will not be monitored by internationally recognized observers.
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There were signs of widespread disillusionment with the vote among the public: the results showed that more than one million votes were invalid, a typical sign of people feeling obliged to vote but not wanting to choose any candidate.
The results showed overall voter turnout was 39.9 percent. Turnout in the 2021 presidential elections in which Raisi was elected was 42 percent, and in March’s parliamentary elections it was 41 percent.
There were calls for a boycott, including of those incarcerated. Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Narges MohammadiMir Hossein Mousavi, one of the leaders of the 2009 Green Movement and who remains under house arrest, is also refusing to vote along with his wife, his daughter said.
Critics say Pezeshkian is just one of the government’s official candidates. In a state television documentary about reformist candidates, one woman said her generation is “moving toward the same level of hostility toward the government that Pezeshkian’s generation had during the 1979 revolution.”
Raisi (63 years old) Died in a helicopter crash on May 19th He was a protégé of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a seen as a possible successor, but most know him for his role in Iran’s mass executions in 1988 and the bloody crackdown on dissent following protests over the death of Mahsa Amini. Young woman in police custody She was accused of improperly wearing the mandatory headscarf, known as the hijab.
The vote comes amid rising tensions in the Middle East. The war between Israel and Hamas In the Gaza Strip.
During April, Iran launches first-ever direct attack on Israel The war in Gaza has seen militias such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels, both of which Iran has armed in the region, join the fighting and intensify attacks.
Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic enrich uranium to near weapons-grade levels And they have stockpiled enough nuclear weapons to build multiple nuclear weapons if they choose to do so.
Despite the recent unrest, only one attack before or after the election was reported: state news agency IRNA reported that gunmen opened fire on a van transporting ballot boxes in the restive southeastern province of Sistan and Baluchestan, killing two police officers and wounding others, a frequent source of violence between security forces, the militant group Jaish al-Adl, and drug traffickers.
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Vadat reported from Tehran, Iran. Naser Karimi in Tehran, Iran, contributed to this report.
