Iran has completed the first round of early presidential elections, which were called after the death of Ebrahim Raisi in a plane crash. It is known that none of the candidates received 50% of the vote.
This was reported by the Iranian state news agency IRNA and Al Mayadeen, Hromadske informs.
According to the Election Commission, Masoud Pezeshkian, a deputy of the Islamic Consultative Council of Iran, is leading the election. He received more than 10.4 million votes out of more than 24.5 million ballots that were counted. The former head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Saeed Jalili, came in second with over 9.4 million votes.
The other two candidates, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf and Mostafa Pourmohammadi, received more than 3.3 million and 206.3 thousand votes, respectively. Before the election, Vice President Amir-Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi and Tehran Mayor Alireza Zakani withdrew their candidacies.
Thus, Pezeshkian and Jalili will compete for the presidency in the second round of the presidential election scheduled for July 5. The total voter turnout in the first round reached 40%.
The death of the President of Iran
On the afternoon of May 19, Iranian state media reported that a helicopter carrying President Ebrahim Raisi had probably crashed near the Azerbaijani city of Julfa. The Iranian leader was returning from Azerbaijan, where he had met with President Ilham Aliyev.
On the morning of May 20, it became known that the Iranian president and all other passengers on board the helicopter had died. Reuters quoted an Iranian official as saying that the helicopter had completely burned down in the crash.
According to the Iranian Constitution, in the event of the death of the president, his successor must be elected within 50 days in a national election. For the first time in Iran’s history, a woman, Zohreh Elahian, was among the candidates who registered to run in the upcoming presidential race.
