DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Close-knit election results were announced Saturday. Iranian Presidential Election The election was between reformist Massoud Pezechkian and hardline candidate Said Jalili, with the two fighting for the lead, raising the possibility of a runoff election.
Early election results reported by Iranian state television initially showed neither candidate was in a position to win outright in Friday's vote, which could have led to a runoff election to decide the successor to the late hardline President Ebrahim Raisi.
Also, voter turnout for the election, a key factor in whether Iranian voters will support the Shiite theocracy, has yet to be announced. A year of economic turmoil And then there were massive protests.
With more than 12 million votes counted, Pezeshkian received more than 5 million votes, while Jalili received 4.8 million.
Another candidate, hardline Parliament Speaker Mohammed Bagher Qalibaf, received about 1.6 million votes, while Shiite cleric Mostafa Pourmohammadi received more than 95,000 votes.
The voters, Three hard-line candidates and a little-known reformer Pezechkian, a cardiac surgeon. 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.
The vote comes amid rising tensions in the Middle East. The war between Israel and Hamas In the Gaza Strip.
More than 50 countries will hold elections in 2024
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, Iran 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.
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 is still under house arrest, has also refused to vote, along with his wife, his daughter said.
Critics say Pezeshkian is merely one of the government's official candidates. In a documentary about him aired on state television, a woman said her generation was “moving toward the same level of hostility toward the government that Pezeshkian's generation had during the 1979 revolution.”
Under Iranian law, a winner must receive at least 50 percent of the total votes. If they don't, the top two candidates in the race advance to a runoff election a week later. Iran has only had one other presidential election with a runoff in its history, in 2005, when hardline dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defeated former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
63-year-old Raisi 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.
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.
___
Karimi reported from Tehran, Iran.
