A hardline ultraconservative, Saeed Jalili, and a moderate or “reformist”, Massoud Pezeshkian, will compete for the presidency of Iran in a second round on July 5, after a presidential election held on Friday in which an absolute record of abstention was recorded since the founding of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979. Only 40.2% or 24,535,185 people cast their ballot out of an electorate that exceeds 61 million, according to the country’s Electoral Commission. These figures once again show popular discontent over the poor economic situation, the lack of freedoms and a deep detachment from the Iranian political system, especially among young people and women. The repeated calls by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to participate “for the continuation, strength, dignity and honor of the Islamic Republic” have not yielded results.
Four candidates, three conservatives and one reformist, had gone to the polls as candidates for the presidency, a position that the death of President Ebrahim Raisí in a helicopter accident on May 19 had left vacant. Of them, the two with the most votes, who go to the second round as they did not exceed the threshold of 50% of the votes, are the ultra-conservative Saeed Jalili and the reformist Masud Pezeshkian. “None of the candidates has obtained an absolute majority of the votes,” the spokesperson for the Electoral Commission, Mohsen Eslami, reported this Saturday in a press conference televised by the state channel IRIB.
According to the latest official figures, Pezeshkian has received 10.4 million votes, just over 40% of the total, while the ultra-conservative Jalili has collected 9.4 million, approximately 38% of the votes. In third place was the also conservative speaker of the Iranian Parliament, Mohamed Bagher Qalibaf, with 3.3 million votes. In fourth place was the cleric Mostafa Pourmohammadi, who barely exceeded 200,000 votes.
Participation has dropped eight points from the 48.4% of the 2021 presidential elections, which ended with the victory in the first round of the late Raisi, but since 2020, when the body in charge of approving or vetoing candidates—the Council of Guardians – massively banned reformist legislative candidates, electoral participation in Iran had only decreased. Friday’s elections were also the first presidential elections after the repression that followed the massive demonstrations sparked by the death in police custody of a young Iranian Kurdish woman, Yina Mahsa Amini, three days after being arrested for wearing her veil incorrectly. In those protests, security forces and paramilitaries killed at least 550 people, according to the UN.
The Iranian president has the power to decide on domestic issues and to a lesser extent on foreign and security policy in Iran, where Khamenei has the final say. The only time presidential candidates had to compete in a run-off was in 2005, when populist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defeated then-President Ahbar Hashemi Rafsanjani in the second round.
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Cardiac surgeon Masoud Pezeshkian, 69-year-old former Minister of Health, began the electoral campaign with low expectations, but has been gaining weight with a message of rapprochement with the West and criticism of the imposition of the Islamic veil through repression and street arrests of the unpopular morality police, the body in custody Amini died, probably from a brutal beating, according to a report by United Nations experts.
Pezeshkian, a low-profile but kind candidate – he raised his daughters alone after being widowed, does not hide his religiosity and has a reputation as a man of integrity, without corruption scandals – has had the support of former presidents Mohamed Khatami (1997-2005) and Hasan Rohaní (2013-2021), both from the reformist bloc – which seeks a certain opening of the Islamic regime. Pezeshkian, in fact, has presented his hypothetical government as a “third term” of Khatami, the first reformist, charismatic and still widely respected president, who breathed a certain air of moderation into Iran, and with whom he entered politics in 2000 as Minister of Health. Pezeshkian also belongs to the Azeri minority, the second ethnic group after the Persians in a country where ethnic identity plays an important role in voting, especially in rural areas.
Their election slogan is “For Iran”, which evokes the title of the song Baraye (because or because) which became the anthem of the protests unleashed by the death of Amini and whose author, Shervin Hajipour, was sentenced to almost four years for it. The use of this topic has earned him criticism from many opponents.
At the opposite pole is Saeed Jalili, the 58-year-old former Iranian chief nuclear negotiator, who has been described as a “true product of the Islamic Revolution,” has served as an advisor to Khamenei, and who displays staunch opposition to any understanding with the West, especially in nuclear matters. Jalili is considered the candidate of the status quo, that will continue or even toughen Raisí’s policies. The orders to repress other demonstrations are partly attributed to him, those in 2019, caused by the increase in the price of gasoline, in which hundreds of people died at the hands of security and paramilitary forces, at least 300, according to Amnesty. International, or even 1,500, three Iranian government officials confirmed to the Reuters agency.
There is no clear outlook for the second round, especially given the high abstention rate. In Iran, high turnout has traditionally benefited reformist candidates, as the conservative vote has proven to be more ideological – it is a religious electorate – and less dependent on the performance of those in office in Iran. Conservatives vote in blocks and always do so, as instructed by Ayatollah Khamenei, the country’s top political and religious leader. Those who voted for the discarded conservative candidate, Qalibaf, are likely to support Jalili in the second round to prevent a victory for his reformist rival.
Pezeshkian’s team is also likely to try to mobilize reformists, who could be encouraged to vote to block Jalili, a hard-line ultraconservative opposed to reviving the nuclear deal with the West. Such a revival depends on the easing of Western sanctions that are strangling Iran’s economy, a country with inflation around 40% and more than a third of its population living below the extreme poverty line. Jalili has also defended the repression of women who have adopted the gesture of civil disobedience by removing their mandatory veils, so some Iranian women may support Pezeshkian only to prevent the ultraconservative from reaching the presidency.
On the reformist side, the very low turnout on Friday is of particular concern, which reveals a failure of this purpose of reactivating its electorate. Many Iranians who for a time supported the reformists with their vote have lost hope that the Islamic Republic of Iran can be reformed from within and their faith in politicians who, like Pezeshkian, present themselves as “reformists”, a label that in no case is equivalent to that of an opponent. During the demonstrations sparked by the death in police custody of Yina Mahsa Amini, many protesters called for the fall of the Islamic regime.
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