Iranians voted in a snap election on Friday to replace late hardline President Ebrahim Raisi, with the race’s only reformist candidate vowing to seek “friendly relations” with the West in an effort to boost his campaign.
The comments by heart surgeon Masoud Pezeshkian come after he and his allies were the subject of a veiled warning from the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, over their rapprochement with the United States.
Pezeshkian’s comments, made after casting his ballot, appeared aimed at boosting turnout as public apathy has become widespread in the Islamic Republic after years of economic woes, mass protests and tensions in the Middle East.
Voters face a choice between hardline candidates and the little-known Pezeshkian, who belongs to Iran’s reformist movement seeking to change its Shiite theocracy from within. As has been the case since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, women and those calling for radical change have been barred from standing as candidates, while the vote itself will not be monitored by internationally recognised observers.
The vote comes as tensions have escalated across the Middle East over the conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip. In April, Iran launched its first direct attack on Israel over the Gaza conflict, while militant groups that Tehran supplies with arms in the region – such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels – are taking part in the fighting and have stepped up their attacks.
Meanwhile, Iran continues to enrich uranium to near weapons-grade levels and maintains an arsenal large enough to build, if it chooses to do so, several nuclear weapons.
Although Khamenei, 85, has the final say in all matters of state, presidents can tilt the country’s policies toward confrontation or negotiation with the West. However, given the low turnout in the last election, it is unclear how many Iranians will participate in Friday’s elections.
Pezeshkian, who voted at a hospital near the capital Tehran, seemed to have that in mind when he responded to a journalist’s question about how Iran would interact with the West if he were president.
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“God willing, we will try to have friendly relations with all countries except Israel,” said the 69-year-old candidate. Israel, long Iran’s regional arch-enemy, faces intense criticism across the Middle East for its devastating conflict in the Gaza Strip.
She also responded to a question about the renewed crackdown on women over the mandatory wearing of the headscarf, or hijab, less than two years after the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, which sparked nationwide protests and a violent response from security forces.
“There should be no inhuman or invasive behaviour against our girls, daughters and mothers,” she said.
Higher turnout could boost Pezeshkian’s chances, and the candidate may have counted on social media to spread his comments, as all the country’s television stations are state-controlled and run by hardliners. But it is unclear whether he will be able to muster the momentum needed to draw voters to the polls. There have been calls for a boycott, including by jailed Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi.
There has also been criticism that Pezeshkian represents simply another government-approved candidate. A woman in a documentary about Pezeshkian broadcast on state television said her generation was “moving towards the same level” of animosity with the government that Pezeshkian’s generation had in the 1979 revolution.
Analysts broadly describe the race as a three-way contest. There are two hardliners, former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf. A Shiite cleric, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, also remained in the race despite poor poll results.
Pezeshkian has aligned himself with figures such as former President Hassan Rouhani, under whose administration Tehran signed the landmark 2015 nuclear deal with world powers.
Voting began just after President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump concluded their first televised debate for the US presidential election, during which Iran came up.
Trump described Iran as “bankrupt” under his administration and highlighted its decision to launch a drone strike in 2020 that killed Revolutionary Guard Gen. Qassem Soleimani. That attack was part of a spiral of rising tensions between the United States and Iran since Trump unilaterally withdrew the United States in 2018 from Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers.
Iranian state media published images of voters queuing in the city of Kerman near Soleimani’s grave.
Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi, in charge of overseeing the elections, announced that all polls had opened right at 8 am local time. Khamenei cast one of the first votes of the election, urging the public to turn out.
“The participation of people with enthusiasm and a larger number of voters is a definite necessity for the Islamic Republic,” Khamenei said.
State television broadcast images of polling stations across the country with moderate queues. Viewers saw no significant queues at many polling stations in Tehran, reminiscent of the low turnout recorded in Iran’s recent parliamentary elections in March.
More than 61 million Iranians over the age of 18 have the right to vote, of which around 18 million are between 18 and 30 years old.
Iranian law requires the winner to obtain 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 has only been one second round in Iran’s history, in 2005, when hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defeated former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
Raisi, 63, died on May 19 in a helicopter crash that also killed the country’s foreign minister and others. He was considered a protégé of Khamenei and a possible successor as supreme leader. Still, many knew him for his participation in the mass executions that Iran carried out in 1988 and for his role in the bloody crackdown on dissent that followed protests over the death of Amini, a young woman detained by police for carrying allegedly inappropriately wearing the mandatory headscarf, or hijab.
Karimi reported from Tehran, Iran.
