Iranians vote in snap election to replace president killed in crash
Iranians voted Friday in a snap election to replace the late hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi, with the race’s sole reformist candidate vowing to seek “friendly relations” with the West in an effort to boost his campaign.
The remarks by heart surgeon Masoud Pezeshkian come after he and his allies were targeted by a veiled warning from the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, over their outreach to the United States.
Iran mourns President Raisi as international condolences pour in
Iranian state media made a point to publish images of voters lined up in the city of Kerman near Soleimani’s grave.
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Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi, who is in charge of overseeing the election, announced all the polls had opened just at 8 a.m. local time. Khamenei cast one of the election’s first votes, urging the public to turn out.
“People’s turnout with enthusiasm, and higher number of voters — this is a definite need for the Islamic Republic,” Khamenei said.
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State television later broadcast images of polling places across the country with modest lines. Onlookers did not see significant lines at many polling centers in Tehran, reminiscent of the low turnout seen in Iran’s recent parliamentary election in March.
More than 61 million Iranians over the age of 18 are eligible to vote, with about 18 million of them between 18 to 30.
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.
The 63-year-old Raisi died in the May 19 helicopter crash that also killed the country’s foreign minister and others. He was seen as a protégé of Khamenei and a potential successor as supreme leader. Still, many knew him for his involvement in the mass executions that Iran conducted in 1988, and for his role in the bloody crackdowns on dissent that followed protests over the death of Amini, a young woman detained by police over allegedly improperly wearing the mandatory headscarf, or hijab.
