Iran will hold a runoff presidential election, an official said Saturday, after an initial vote saw the top candidates not securing an outright win in the lowest turnout poll ever held in the country by percentage.
The election this coming Friday will pit reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian against the hard-line former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili.
Mohsen Eslami, an election spokesman, announced the result in a news conference carried by Iranian state television. He said of 24.5 million votes cast, Pezeshkian got 10.4 million while Jalili received 9.4 million.
Parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf got 3.3 million. Shiite cleric Mostafa Pourmohammadi had over 206,000 votes.
Iranian law requires that a winner gets more than 50% of all votes cast. If not, 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.
Eslami acknowledged the country's Guardian Council would need to offer formal approval, but the result did not draw any immediate challenge from contenders in the race.
The overall turnout was 39.9%, according to the results. The 2021 presidential election that elected late hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi saw a 42% turnout, while the March parliamentary election saw a 41% turnout.
There had been calls for a boycott, including from imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi. Mir Hossein Mousavi, one of the leaders of the 2009 Green Movement protests who remains under house arrest, has also refused to vote along with his wife, his daughter said.
There’s also been criticism that Pezeshkian represents just another government-approved candidate.
Raisi, 63, died in a May 19 helicopter crash that also killed the country’s foreign minister and others.
