Coming in first in the first round, reformist candidate Massoud Pezeshkian will face ultraconservative Saïd Jalili next Friday for a second round.
An ultraconservative faces a reformer. Next Friday, the regime’s candidate Said Jalili will face moderate Massoud Pezeshkian in a second round to succeed Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash a month ago.
Both candidates came out on top in the presidential election, which was held on Friday in Iran.
“None of the candidates were able to obtain an absolute majority of votes”in the first round and, “consequently, the first and second candidates” will be decided by a second round on July 5, Mohsen Eslami, the spokesperson for the elections department at the ministry, told the press.
Iranian law requires the winner to obtain more than 50% of all votes cast. Otherwise, the two best candidates in the race will move on to the second round a week later.
The results were announced Saturday at a press conference broadcast on Iranian state television by Mohsen Eslami, election spokesman.
According to these results, it is the moderate Massoud Pezeshkian who took the lead in the poll with 10.4 million votes out of 24.5 million. While Jalili got 9.4 million votes. As for the President of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, he only obtained 3.3 million votes (the Shiite cleric Mostafa Pourmohammadi obtained more than 206,000).
Historically, Iran has only had one runoff election, in 2005, when hard-line Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defeated former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Note that this election was marked by a low participation rate (40%). If this figure is accurate it would make it the lowest rate since the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
This figure testifies to the weariness of the Iranian people in the face of a vote whose organization is very closed, especially afterthe great protest movement that has shaken the country over the past two yearsin the name of democracy and women’s freedom.
Women and advocates of radical change were not allowed to run, and the elections will not be subject to any monitoring by internationally recognized observers.
Calls for a boycott have been launched, including from Narges Mohammadi, the imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner. Mir Hossein Mousavi, leader of the 2009 Green Movement protests and still under house arrest, also refused to vote, according to his daughter.
Ebrahim Raisi, a key figure in Iranian politics, died in a helicopter crash on May 19, alongside the country’s foreign minister and others. Raisi was considered a protégé of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a potential successor, Although he is widely known for his role in the 1988 mass executions and thebloody repression of dissent following protests over the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman detained for allegedly wearing the compulsory hijab incorrectly.