International, Bnagladesh Global: Iran will hold a run-off 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 held in the Islamic Republic, reports AP.
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 the 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 percent is itself a gauge of the Iranian electorates' waning support of 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.
There's 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 with the government that Pezeshkian's generation had in the 1979 revolution.
Iranian law requires that a winner gets 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.
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