Pezeshkian, Jalili advance to presidential runoff in Iran

 

The Cradle, June 29, 2024 — 

None of the four candidates received more than 50 percent of the first round vote.

Iran’s presidential election will move to a runoff after no candidate won over 50 percent of the first round vote, Tasnim reported on 29 June.

Masoud Pezeshkian and Saeed Jalili, the two candidates with the highest number of votes, will face off in the next and final stage of voting on 5 July.

The spokesman for the Elections Headquarters announced the results, saying that Iranians cast 24,535,185 votes, for a turnout rate of 40 percent.

Pezeshkian won 10,415,991 votes, equivalent to 42 percent, while the runner-up, Jalili, won 9,473,298 votes, or 39 percent.

The two other candidates, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf and Mustafa Pour-Mohammadi, garnered 14 percent and less than 1 percent of the votes, respectively.

Iran was forced to hold early presidential elections after the previous president, Ebrahim Raisi, died in a helicopter crash in May along with foreign minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and six other Iranian officials.

Front runner Pezeshkian, 69, is a heart surgeon who has represented the northern city of Tabriz in parliament since 2008.

He served as health minister under Iran’s last reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, who held office from 1997 to 2005. Khatami has endorsed Pezeshkian’s bid in the current elections.

Saeed Jalili is Iran’s former nuclear negotiator and is viewed as more conservative.

The 58-year-old has held several senior positions in the Islamic Republic, including in Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s office in the early 2000s.

He is currently one of Khamenei’s representatives in the Supreme National Security Council, Iran’s highest security body.

The election “has the potential to reshape the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy direction or further entrench the direction set by the Raisi administration,” Vali Kaleji wrote for The Cradle on 26 June. 

The government that assumes power will be the 14th since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.