Polls in Iran opened on Friday for a presidential election following the death of ultraconservative president Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash last month.
Around 61 million Iranians are eligible to vote in the polls where reformist Masoud Pezeshkian, 69, hopes for a breakthrough win against a divided conservative camp.
The Guardian Council allowed him to run against a field of conservatives now dominated by parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili after two ultraconservatives dropped out — Tehran major Alireza Zakani and Raisi’s former vice president Amir-Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi.
Early projections of the results are expected by Saturday morning and official results by Sunday.
If no candidate wins 50 percent of the vote, a second round will be held on July 5, for only the second time in Iranian electoral history after the 2005 vote went to a runoff.
The candidacy of Pezeshkian, until recently a relative unknown, has revived cautious hopes for Iran’s reformist wing after years of dominance by the conservative and ultraconservative camps.
Iran’s last reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, praised him as “honest, fair and caring”.
‘Resolve our problems’
Ultimate political power in Iran is held by Khamenei, the supreme leader.
Khamenei insisted this week that “the most qualified candidate” must be “the one who truly believes in the principles of the Islamic Revolution.”
The next president, he said, must allow Iran “to move forward without being dependent on foreign countries”.
However, Khamenei also said that Iran should not “cut its relations with the world”.
During campaign debates, Jalili criticised the moderates for having signed the 2015 nuclear accord which promised Iran sanctions relief in return for curbs on the programme.
Jalili said the deal, which the United States withdrew from in 2018, “did not benefit Iran at all”.
Pezeshkian has urged efforts to salvage the agreement and lift crippling sanctions on the Iranian economy.
The contentious issue of the compulsory head covering for women also emerged during the campaign, almost two years since a vast protest movement swept the country after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, 22.
In the televised debates, all candidates distanced themselves from the sometimes heavy-handed police arrests of women refusing to wear the hijab head covering in public.
Pourmohammadi, the only clerical candidate, said that “under no circumstances should we treat Iranian women with such cruelty.”
Ramin Khanizadeh and Ahmad Parhizi, with AFP
