Masoud Pezeshkian won Iran’s second-round
presidential vote held Friday, receiving more than 16 million votes to
candidate and former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili’s more than 13
million, according to Tehran’s electoral authority.
Some 30 million ballots were cast, putting turnout at about 49.8%, up from the record low 39.93% in the first round.
Pezeshkian, an supposed reformer, has called for outreach to the West, drawing the ire of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.
However, he is not expected to produce any major policy shift in the
Islamic Republic’s nuclear program or support for terrorist groups
across the Middle East, including Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon,
the Houthis in Yemen and numerous militias in Iraq and Syria.
Pezeshkian, a former heart surgeon born in
1954 to an Iranian Azerbaijani father and Iranian Kurdish mother, said
on Friday that should he win the presidency, he would “try to have
friendly relations with all countries except Israel.”
Jalili is known as the “Living Martyr” due
to the fact that he lost a leg during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, and is
a hard-liner known for fiery speeches.
The runoff followed a June 28 snap election called in the aftermath of President Ebrahim Raisi‘s
death in a May 19 helicopter crash. Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein
Amir-Abdollahian; Mohammad Ali Ale-Hashem, the regime’s representative
in East Azerbaijan; and Malek Rahmati, the province’s governor, were
also killed, along with the pilot and co-pilot.
Afterwards, Khamenei
confirmed that First Vice President Mohammad Mokhber would temporarily
take charge of the executive branch and had up to 50 days to hold
elections.
Concurrently, Iranian Foreign Ministry
spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said Tehran’s support for “the oppressed
people of Palestine and resistance groups [pursuing] the unalienable
rights of the Palestinians to the liberation of their land and standing
against the usurping Zionist regime” will carry on unchanged.
Kanaani also said that Amir-Abdollahian’s efforts to lift sanctions on Tehran would continue.
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