Iran|A second round next week seems likely.
Reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian and a hardline conservative Saeed Jalili are leading the vote count for Friday’s presidential election in Iran.
According to preliminary figures announced by Iran’s Ministry of Interior on Saturday morning, Pezeshkian leads Jalil by more than a million votes, after more than 19 million votes had been counted, the news agency AFP reports.
If the results remain similar as the counting of votes continues, Pezeshkia and Jalili, who led Iran’s nuclear weapons negotiations, will go to the second round of the presidential election on Friday next week. It is organized if no candidate receives more than half of the votes cast in the first round.
A man was watching newspaper election coverage in Tehran on Saturday.
On Saturday morning, the elderly speaker of the parliament came third in the vote count By Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf and the fourth representing the ancient clergy Mostafa Pourmohammadi.
Premature the presidential election ended because the old president Ebrahim Raisi died last month in a helicopter crash.
Iran’s so-called Council of Supervisors allowed reformist Pezeshkian to run in part because the regime wanted to boost voter turnout in the election.
“A high voter turnout could show that there are real options in the elections and that the elections are free”, evaluate Director of the Finnish Middle East Institute Susanne Dahlgren earlier this week to Helsingin Sanomat.
However, according to the insiders interviewed by the news agency Reuters, only about 40 people know the turnout, which would be less than the clerical power of Iran has hoped.
There are around 61 million people entitled to vote.
Second Jalil, who is on the ballot, is considered the Ayatollah of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei as a shield.
The elections are not expected to bring much change to the Islamic Republic, whose young population is fed up with the old system. Dissatisfaction erupted into widespread protests in 2022.
However, the election result may affect the choice of a successor to the 85-year-old Khamenei, who has ruled since 1989. The late ultra-conservative Raisi was considered by the leadership to be the ideal successor to Khamenei.
The president is the second highest leader of Iran.
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