Masoud Pezeshkian, one of two candidates who qualified for the second round of Iran’s presidential election, arrives at a polling station to cast his vote in Tehran on Friday.
SAMAN/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty
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SAMAN/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty
ISTANBUL — Iranian voters have given reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian a decisive victory in the runoff election to replace former President Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash in May.
Iran’s president-elect, Pezeshkian, a heart surgeon and lawmaker who ran on a moderately reformist platform, was a relatively unknown candidate. But voters turned out in greater numbers than in the first round, giving him more than 2.8 million votes ahead of hard-line conservative Saeed Jalili, a former nuclear negotiator with strongly anti-Western views.
Iranian authorities said nearly 30 million people turned out to vote Friday, about 49.6 percent of registered voters, considered a low percentage for a presidential election. Authorities said Pezeshkian received 16.3 million votes to Jalili’s 13.5 million.
Pezeshkian has made only modest proposals during the campaign, showing no inclination to push for meaningful changes in a government that leaves all major matters of state to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Pezeshkian will also face a government still largely controlled by hardliners, at a time of tensions with the West over a number of issues, including the war in Gaza.
How to achieve today’s result
Early elections were called after the death of late President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash on May 19.
The Guardian Council of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which is responsible for selecting candidates, had narrowed the list to just six candidates: five radical conservatives and one reformist. But two candidates withdrew before the first vote.
On June 28, the first round of the presidential election took place between the four remaining candidates: Pezeshkian, Jalili, parliamentary speaker and former Tehran mayor Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, and Mostafa Pourmohammadi, a Shiite cleric who served in Iran’s interior and intelligence ministries.
But no candidate won a majority of the vote, with Pezeshkian leading with 10.4 million votes, while Jalili came in second with 9.4 million. They advance to Friday’s runoff election.
This is the second round of the presidential election in the country’s history. The first was in 2005, when hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won against former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
