Iran holds early presidential elections after Raisi’s death with five candidates for office

The Guardian Council eliminated more than 75 candidates and has only given its approval to one reformist

June 27 (EUROPA PRESS) –

The population of Iran is called to the polls this Friday for early elections called following the death in May of the country’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, in a helicopter accident that plunged the country into an interim state and led to a vote. with six candidates for the position, with a single reformist among the group validated by the Council of Guardians.

The death of Raisi in a plane crash in the province of East Azerbaijan (northwest), which also resulted in the death of the other seven occupants of the plane, including the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Hosein Amirabdolahian, led the authorities to initiate a 50-day constitutional process for calling elections, finally set for June 28.

In this way, the vote will be the second to be held in advance since the establishment of the Islamic Republic after the success of the 1979 revolution and will also arrive just a few months after legislative elections that had participation at historic lows due to the call to the boycott by sectors of the opposition and popular unrest following the repression of protests over the death in custody of Mahsa Amini and the economic crisis.

The electoral campaign has been brief and has been marked by five televised debates between the six candidates – although in the end only five will attend, after their withdrawal at the last minute – to present their programs and convince the population to vote for them. their profiles, despite the fact that, traditionally, presidents have relative power in the country, dominated by the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

The death of Raisi – the second president to die in office, after Mohamad Ali Rajai, who died in an attack in 1981 -, who was still in his first term after his victory in 2021, also represented a setback for the establishment. clerical, since he appeared as one of the main favorites to replace Khamenei, 85 years old and supreme leader since 1989, in the future.

In this way, the political cycle that has been in place since 1989 will be broken, when conservative and moderate presidents have succeeded one another after completing their two four-year terms, as happened with Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani (1989-1997) – who succeeded Khamenei, president between 1981 and 1989 -, Mohamed Khatami (1997-2005), Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-2013), Hassan Rohani (2013-2021) and Raisi himself.

The candidates in contention have reached the final phase of the process after passing the filter of the Guardian Council – made up of clerics and jurists and supervised by Khamenei – which eliminated a total of 76 candidates, including Ahmadinejad and the former president of the Parliament Alí Lariyani, who were already removed from the process in 2021, without further explanation.

In addition to who will be the next president at a time of great tension in the region due to Israel’s offensive against the Gaza Strip after the attacks carried out on October 7 by Hamas and other Palestinian factions and the disputes over the Iranian nuclear program, Another of the main focuses of attention will be on participation, since the authorities aspire to high numbers that show support for the system.

CONSERVATIVE DOMAIN

On this occasion, as in the last presidential elections, the conservative candidates dominate the spectrum, with three considered traditional conservatives, an ultra-conservative and a reformist, who aspires to bring together the vote of people dissatisfied with the political, economic and social situation. in order to force a second round.

The hours leading up to the vote were marked by the decision of ultra-conservative Amir Hosein Qazizadeh Hashemi to withdraw his candidacy, in a message in which he called on other conservatives to do the same in order to support a single consensus candidate to “maintain the unity of the forces of the revolution” and “continue” the efforts of the “martyr” Raisi.

Thus, one of the main favorites is Mohamad Baqer Qalibaf, a former unit commander of the Revolutionary Guard, former mayor of Tehran and current president of Parliament who has appeared on the list of candidates on several occasions, without ever being considered as one. of the main candidates for the Presidency.

Qalibaf, who has already run for three presidential elections, also has the support of the Revolutionary Guard and is considered a pragmatic conservative, which could put him above the rest of the candidates in this particular situation, although he has been mired in several corruption scandals that have damaged his image.

The second of the conservative candidates is Said Jalili, who was a nuclear negotiator between 2007 and 2013 and is Khamenei’s representative before the Supreme National Security Council, so he has support in the establishment, also for his role as a veteran of war in the conflict with Iraq (1980-1988), in which he was part of the Basij volunteer force and lost part of a leg.

Jalili, who came third in 20213 and dropped out in 2021 in favour of Raisi’s candidacy, will also face another prominent figure among the conservatives, Mostafa Purmohamadi, considered a pragmatic conservative and known, like Raisi — who was nicknamed “the butcher of Tehran” — for his role in the execution of thousands of political prisoners in 1988.

Likewise, he has been Minister of Justice under Rohani and head of the Interior portfolio under Ahmadinejad and has been at the forefront of some of the most recent campaigns of repression in the country. In addition, he has a profile that could make him a contender to replace Khamenei, a position to which the supreme leader’s son, Mojtaba, now aspires, after Raisi’s death has left him as one of the main candidates.

Alireza Zakani, mayor of Tehran, who is the politician with the least aspirations to win victory, participates on behalf of the ultraconservatives. The politician, another veteran of the war with Iraq, was disqualified in 2013 and 2017, while in 2021 he withdrew at the last minute to support Raisi’s candidacy.

PEZASHKIAN, THE REFORMIST HOPE

Finally, there is only one reformist candidate, Masud Pezashkian, a surgeon and former health minister under President Khatami who has been critical of the repression of protests over Amini’s death in 2022, which became the main challenge to the authorities in recent decades.

Pezashkian, who has received support from Rohani in recent hours and has been the focus of criticism from Khamenei, is part of the Azeri minority that lives mainly in the northwest of the country, one of the main epicenters of anti-government protests during the last years.

For a winner to be declared in the first round, the winner must obtain an absolute majority of the votes. Otherwise, a second round will be held three weeks later between the two candidates with the most votes, which opens the door for Pezeshkian to bring together the votes of reformists and those aspiring to a change in policies that will lead him to face each other face to face. to a conservative candidate.

To date, all elections – with the exception of 2005, in which Rafsanjani and Ahmadinejad went to a second round in which the latter won – have ended with a clear victory in the first round, sometimes in through complaints about fraud and manipulation of the results, as occurred in 2009 during the so-called Green Movement, which denounced the “theft” of the victory of the reformist Mir Hossein Mousavi to give a second mandate to the aforementioned Ahmedinejad.