As vote counting continues in Iran’s presidential runoff election, reformist candidate Massoud Pezeshkian opened up a lead of more than 2 million votes over hardline candidate Saeed Jalili early Saturday.
Supporters of Pezeshkian, a heart surgeon and longtime lawmaker, took to the streets of Tehran and other cities before dawn, celebrating his widening lead over Jalili, a former nuclear negotiator close to Iran’s supreme leader.
Election spokesman Mohsen Eslami said Pezeshkian had received 11.1 million votes, giving him a lead over Jalili’s 9 million. He did not give a total number of voters as the counting continued.
The first round of voting, held on June 28, saw the lowest voter turnout in Iran’s history since the 1979 revolution. Iranian officials have long pointed to the turnout as a sign of support for the Shiite theocracy in a country under strain due to years of sanctions that have suffocated the Iranian economy, mass demonstrations and a harsh crackdown on all dissent.
Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other government officials expected turnout to increase as voting began, and state television showed images of low-key queues at some polling stations.
But online videos reportedly showed some polling stations empty, and a survey of dozens of locations in the capital Tehran showed light traffic amid heavy security on the streets.
More than 61 million Iranians aged 18 and above are eligible to vote, including around 18 million between the ages of 18 and 30. Polls were due to close at 6pm but were extended until midnight to increase turnout.
The late President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May, was a protégé of Khamenei and was seen as a possible successor as supreme leader. Khamenei remains the final decision maker in national affairs, but whoever wins the presidential election is likely to tilt the country’s foreign policy toward either confrontation or cooperation with the West.
Raisi is known to many for his role in Iran’s 1988 mass executions and in the bloody crackdown on dissent that followed protests in 2022 over the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who was detained by police for allegedly improperly wearing the mandatory headscarf, or hijab.
In April, Iran launched its first direct attack on Israel, while militias in the region that it supplies with weapons, such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels, have joined the fighting and intensified their attacks.
Iran has enriched uranium to near weapons-grade levels and maintains a uranium stockpile large enough to build multiple nuclear weapons if necessary.
The campaign also repeatedly touched on what would happen if Donald Trump won the US election in November, who withdrew the US from the nuclear deal between Iran in 2018. Iran has been in indirect talks with President Joe Biden’s administration, but there has been no clear move to curb Iran’s nuclear program in exchange for the lifting of economic sanctions.
Associated Press
