An official said on Saturday that Iran will hold a second election for president to replace the late hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi. This is because the top candidates did not get a majority win in the first vote, which had the lowest percentage of people voting in any poll ever held in the Islamic Republic.
An open-government candidate, Masoud Pezeshkian, will face off against a hard-line former nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, in the runoff election this coming Friday.
A spokesperson for the election, Mohsen Eslami, told reporters on Iranian state TV that the results had been announced. He said that out of the 24.5 million votes that were cast, 10.4 million went to Pezeshkian and 9.4 million went to Jalili. Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, who is speaker of parliament, got 3.3 million votes. Mostafa Pourmohammadi, a Shiite cleric, got more than 206,000 votes.
By law, a winner must get more than half of all the votes cast. Those who don’t will have to go to a runoff election a week later. In Iran’s history, there has only been one runoff election for president. That was in 2005, when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad beat former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Eslami knew that the country’s Guardian Council would have to give official approval, but other candidates in the race didn’t challenge the result right away.
Women and people who want radical change have been banned from running for office, as they have been since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. There will also be no internationally recognized monitors present during the vote.
There were signs that people were unhappy with the vote as a whole. The results show that more than a million votes were thrown out. This is usually done by people who felt like they had to vote but didn’t want to choose any of the candidates.
The results show that 39.9% of people who were eligible to vote did so. A 42% turnout was seen in the 2021 presidential election, which is how Raisi was elected. A 41% turnout was seen in the March parliamentary election.
A boycott had been called for, even by Narges Mohammadi, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who is currently in jail. One of the leaders of the Green Movement protests in 2009, Mir Hossein Mousavi, is still being held under house arrest. His daughter said that he and his wife have also refused to vote.
Some people have also said that Pezeshkian is just another candidate backed by the government. State TV showed a documentary about the reformist candidate. In it, a woman said that her generation was “moving toward the same level” of anger toward the government as Pezeshkian’s generation was during the revolution in 1979.
Raisi, who was 63 years old, died in the May 19 helicopter crash that also killed the foreign minister of the country and other people. Those in power in Iran saw him as a protégé of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a possible successor. Still, a lot of people knew him for his part in Iran’s mass executions in 1988 and the violent crackdowns on protesters that happened after the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who was detained by police for allegedly not wearing the required headscarf, or hijab, properly.
The vote happened at a time when the Middle East was already very tense because of the war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Iran’s first direct attack on Israel was over the war in Gaza in April. Militia groups that Iran supports in the area, like Hezbollah in Lebanon and Houthi rebels in Yemen, are also fighting and have stepped up their attacks.
The Islamic Republic, on the other hand, keeps enriching uranium to levels close to those needed for weapons and keeps a large enough stockpile to build several nuclear weapons if it wants to.
Even though there has been a lot of unrest lately, there was only one attack reported around the election. The unstable southeast province of Sistan and Baluchestan was hit by gunmen who opened fire on a van carrying ballot boxes. The attack killed two police officers and hurt others, according to the state-run IRNA news agency. There is a lot of fighting in the province between police, drug traffickers, and the militant group Jaish al-Adl.
