Saeed Jalili, a former hardline Iranian nuclear negotiator and presidential election candidate, casts his poll at a polling station in Tehran, Iran, June 28, 2024. Iranians are voting in an early election to interchange the late hardline President Ebrahim Raisi. | Photograph credit score: AP
Early swing outcomes launched Saturday in Iran’s presidential election put the race between reformist Masoud Pezeshkian and hardliner Saeed Jalili, with the lead swapped between the 2 males as a runoff appeared doubtless.
Early outcomes, reported by Iranian state tv, didn’t initially put both man able to win Friday’s election outright, doubtlessly setting the stage for a runoff vote to interchange late President Ebrahim Raisi.
He has additionally not but supplied turnout figures for the race, an important element in figuring out whether or not Iran’s citizens backs its Shiite theocracy after years of financial turmoil and mass protests.
After counting greater than 12 million votes, Pezeshkian had 5.3 million whereas Jalili had 4.8 million.
One other candidate, hardline parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, gained round 1.6 million votes. Shiite cleric Mostafa Pourmohammadi gained greater than 95,000 votes.
Voters had to decide on between three hardline candidates and little-known reformist Pezeshkian, a coronary heart surgeon. As has been the case for the reason that 1979 Islamic Revolution, girls and people calling for radical change should not allowed to face within the elections, and the vote itself is not going to be monitored by internationally recognised observers.
The vote got here at a time when rising tensions have gripped the Center East over the struggle between Israel and Hamas within the Gaza Strip.
In April, Iran launched its first direct assault on Israel over the Gaza struggle, whereas militia teams armed by Tehran within the area (corresponding to Lebanese Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels) are concerned within the preventing and have stepped up their assaults.
In the meantime, Iran continues to complement uranium to close weapons-grade ranges and maintains an arsenal massive sufficient to construct, if it chooses to take action, a number of nuclear weapons.
There have been requires a boycott, together with from Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, who’s in jail. Mir Hossein Mousavi, one of many leaders of the 2009 Inexperienced Motion protests, who stays beneath home arrest, has additionally refused to vote along with his spouse, his daughter has reported.
There has additionally been criticism that Pezeshkian represents merely one other government-approved candidate. One girl, in a documentary about Pezeshkian aired on state tv, stated her technology was “transferring towards the identical stage” of animosity with the federal government that Pezeshkian’s technology had within the 1979 revolution.
Iranian legislation requires the winner to acquire greater than 50% of all votes solid. If that does not occur, the race’s prime two candidates will advance to a runoff per week later. There has solely been one second spherical in Iran’s historical past: in 2005, when hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defeated former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Raisi, 63, died within the Could 19 helicopter crash that additionally killed the nation’s overseas minister and others. He was thought of a protégé of Iran’s supreme chief, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and a doable successor. Nonetheless, many knew him for his participation within the mass executions that Iran carried out in 1988 and for his position within the bloody crackdown on dissent that adopted protests over the demise of Amini, a younger girl detained by police for allegedly improperly carrying the obligatory headband, or hijab.
