After winning the runoff election with 53.7 percent of the vote, Pezechkian vowed to reach out to all Iranians.
Iran's president-elect, Massoud Pezechkian, vowed to reach out to all Iranians, in his first comments since being announced as the winner of a runoff election against hardline rival Saeed Jalili.
“Without your friendship, empathy and trust, the difficult road ahead would not be smooth. I am reaching out to you,” Pezeshkian said in a post on X on Saturday, reiterating his earlier promise to “extend the hand of friendship to all” if he won.
“By acquiring [the] “With a majority of the votes cast on Friday, Mr Pezeshkian has been sworn in as the next president of Iran,” the Interior Ministry said in a statement on Saturday.
According to official tallies, Pezeshkian won 53.7 percent of the vote, or 16.3 million votes out of more than 30 million cast, while Jalili won 44.3 percent, or 13.5 million votes.
Shortly after the ministry's announcement, Jalili conceded defeat and said whoever was elected by the people must be respected.
“Not only should he be respected, but we must now do everything in our power to help him move forward strong,” he told state television.
A celebratory mood spread after the results were announced, with small groups of Pezechkian's supporters taking to the streets.
Low voter turnout
The election, with turnout of 49.8 percent, was a close race between Pezeshkian, the only moderate of the original four candidates who pledged to open Iran to the world, and Jalili, a former nuclear negotiator who was a strong advocate of closer ties between Iran and Russia and China.
Friday's runoff election followed a historically low turnout in a June 28 vote in which more than 60 percent of Iranian voters abstained from voting to replace Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May.
In the June election, Pezeshkian won about 42.5% of the vote, while Jalili won about 38.7%.
Just 40% of the country's 61 million eligible voters cast ballots in June, the lowest turnout for a presidential election since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Al Jazeera's Resul Serdar, reporting from Tehran, said around 50 percent of Iranians did not vote because some people “did not believe that the elections would bring any change, whether the winner was a conservative or a reformist.”
Others boycotted the election, Serdar said. “It's a silent protest.”
Political analysts say Pezeshkian's victory could promote a pragmatic foreign policy, ease tensions over currently stalled negotiations with world powers to revive the 2015 nuclear deal and improve prospects for social liberalization and political pluralism in Iran.
But Pezeshkian, a former health minister, has publicly said he has no intention of taking on Iran's leading Islamic scholars and hard-line security elite, leaving many Iranian voters skeptical he can deliver on his election promises.
Both presidential candidates promised to revive a struggling economy plagued by mismanagement and reimposed sanctions since 2018 after then-President Donald Trump unilaterally abandoned the nuclear deal.
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