Voting began on Friday in Iran’s presidential election following the death of ultra-conservative President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash last month.
About 61 million Iranians are eligible to vote, where 69-year-old reformist Masoud Pezeshkian is expected to win a significant victory against a divided conservative camp.
The Guardian Council, which vets candidates, gave him the green light to run against the conservatives, now dominated by parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili.
With the elimination of two ultra-conservatives – Tehran’s Major Alireza Zakani and Raisi’s former vice president Amir Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi – cleric Mostafa Pourmohammadi is now left in the race.
“We are starting the election for the country’s 14th president,” Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi said in a televised address.
Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei cast his ballot shortly after voting began and urged Iranians to vote.
“Election day is a day of joy and happiness for us Iranians,” he said in a televised speech, calling for a large voter turnout.
He said, “We encourage our loved ones to take the issue of voting seriously and participate in it.”
The election in sanctions-hit Iran is being held at a time of high regional tensions between the Islamic Republic and its arch foes Israel and the United States, as well as the Gaza war.
Voting began at 8 am (0430 GMT) at 58,640 polling stations across the country, most of them in schools and mosques.
Voting centers will remain open for 10 hours, although authorities may extend voting time as in previous elections.
Preliminary estimates of results are expected by Saturday morning and official results by Sunday.
If no candidate wins 50 percent of the vote, a second round of voting will be held on July 5, marking only the second time in Iranian electoral history that voting went to a second round, after 2005.
The candidacy of Pezeshkian, who was relatively unknown until recently, has revived cautious hopes for Iran’s reformist side after years of dominance by the conservative and ultra-conservative camps.
Iran’s last reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, praised him as “honest, fair and caring”.
Khatami, who was president from 1997 to 2005, also supported moderate Hassan Rouhani, who won the presidency and finalised Iran’s nuclear deal with Western powers in 2015, though the agreement derailed three years later.
‘Solve our problems’
The Iranian opposition, particularly Iranian expatriates, have called for a boycott of the vote.
The ultimate political power in Iran rests with Supreme Leader Khamenei.
Khamenei insisted this week that the “most qualified candidate” should be someone who “truly believes in the principles of the Islamic revolution” of 1979 that overthrew the US-backed monarchy.
He said the next president must allow Iran “to move forward without relying on foreign countries.”
However, Khamenei also said that Iran “should not break its ties with the world.”
During election debates, Jalili criticized liberals for signing the 2015 nuclear deal that promised Iran sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on the program.
Jalili said the deal, from which the United States withdrew in 2018 under then-President Donald Trump, “did not benefit Iran at all”.
Pezeshkian has called for efforts to save the deal and lift sanctions on the Iranian economy.
He asked, “Should we forever adopt a hostile attitude toward America, or should we aspire to resolve our problems with this country?”
The controversial issue of mandatory head coverings for women also emerged during the campaign, while a massive protest movement was launched in the country nearly two years ago following the custodial death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini.
Amini, an Iranian Kurd, was arrested for allegedly violating the strict dress code imposed on women in the country.
In televised debates, all candidates distanced themselves from the occasional harsh arrests by police of women who refuse to wear the hijab in public.
Pourmohammadi, the only cleric candidate, said that “under no circumstances should we treat Iranian women so brutally.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
