Iran will hold a runoff presidential election on Friday, July 5, after an initial vote saw reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian and hard-liner Saeed Jalili each fall short of securing an outright win in an election with the lowest turnout ever in the Islamic Republic.
Iranian state television reported the results that triggered a second round of voting, with the two candidates neck and neck in the race to replace hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May.
After counting over 24.5 million votes, Pezeshkian had 10.41 million while Jalili held 9.47 million.
The historically low turnout of 39.96% is itself a gauge of the Iranian electorate’s waning support for its Shiite theocracy after years of economic turmoil and mass protests.
Another candidate, hard-line Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, had some 3.38 million votes. Shiite cleric Mostafa Pourmohammadi had just over 206,000 votes.
Voters faced a choice between the three hard-line candidates and the little-known reformist Pezeshkian, a heart surgeon. As has been the case since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, women and those calling for radical change have been barred from running, while the vote itself will have no oversight from internationally recognized monitors.
The voting came as wider tensions have gripped the Middle East over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip.
In April, Iran launched its first-ever direct attack on Israel over the war in Gaza, while militia groups that Tehran arms in the region — such as the Lebanese Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels — are engaged in the fighting and have escalated their attacks.
Meanwhile, Iran continues to enrich uranium at near weapons-grade levels and maintains a stockpile large enough to build — should it choose to do so — several nuclear weapons.
There had been calls for a boycott, including from imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi. Mir Hossein Mousavi, one of the leaders of the 2009 Green Movement protests who remains under house arrest, has also refused to vote along with his wife, his daughter said.
There has also been criticism that Pezeshkian represents just another government-approved candidate. One woman in a documentary on Pezeshkian aired by state TV said her generation was “moving toward the same level” of animosity toward the government that Pezeshkian’s generation had in the 1979 revolution.
Iranian law requires that a winner get more than 50% of all votes cast. If that doesn’t happen, the race’s top two candidates will advance to a runoff a week later. There’s been only one runoff presidential election in Iran’s history: in 2005, when hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad bested former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
The 63-year-old Raisi died in the May 19 helicopter crash that also killed the country’s foreign minister and others. He was seen as a protégé of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and a potential successor. Still, many knew him for his involvement in the mass executions that Iran conducted in 1988, and for the bloody crackdowns on dissent during his presidency that followed protests over the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman detained by police for allegedly improperly wearing the mandatory headscarf, or hijab.
Despite the recent unrest, there was only one reported attack around the election. Gunmen opened fire on a van transporting ballot boxes in the restive southeastern province of Sistan and Baluchestan, killing two police officers and wounding others, the state-run IRNA news agency reported. The province regularly sees violence between security forces and the militant group Jaish al-Adl, as well as drug traffickers.
