Tehran:
Iranian voters went to the polls Friday in a presidential election in which ultraconservative cleric Ebrahim Raisi is seen as all but specific to coast to victory more than his vetted rivals.
After a lacklustre campaign, turnout is anticipated to plummet to a new low in a nation exhausted by a punishing regime of US financial sanctions and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Election placards are somewhat sparse in the capital Tehran, dominated by these displaying the austere face of frontrunner Raisi, 60, in his trademark black turban and flowing religious robe.
Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei cast the initial vote just immediately after 7:00 am (0230 GMT) at a specially installed ballot box at a mosque adjoining his offices in the capital.
He then urged Iranian’s practically 60 million eligible voters to stick to suit, saying: “The sooner you perform this task and duty, the better. Everything that the Iranian people do today until tonight, by going to the polls and voting, serves to build their future.”
Polls close at midnight (1930 GMT), and possibly two hours later, with final results anticipated about noon Saturday.
The winner will take more than in August as Iran’s eighth president from incumbent Hassan Rouhani, a moderate who has served the maximum of two consecutive 4-year-terms permitted below the constitution.
Ultimate political energy in Iran, considering the fact that its 1979 revolution toppled the US-backed monarchy, rests with the supreme leader.
But the president of the Islamic republic, as the prime official of the state bureaucracy, also wields important influence in fields from industrial policy to foreign affairs.
Rouhani’s important achievement was the landmark 2015 deal with world powers below which Iran pledged to limit its nuclear programme and refrain from acquiring the atomic bomb in return for sanctions relief.
– Candidates Pull Out –
But higher hopes for higher prosperity and a reopening to the world had been crushed in 2018 when then-US president Donald Trump withdrew from the accord and launched an financial and diplomatic “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran.
While Iran has insisted its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes only, Trump accused it of secretly looking for the bomb and of destabilising the wider Middle East by means of armed proxy groups.
As old and new US sanctions hit Iran, trade dried up and foreign businesses bolted. The economy nosedived and spiralling costs fuelled repeated bouts of social unrest which had been place down by safety forces.
Iran’s ultraconservative camp — which deeply distrusts the United States, labelled the “Great Satan” or the “Global Arrogance” in the Islamic republic — attacked Rouhani more than the failing deal.
They swept parliament early last year and now look set to claim the presidency in the nationwide poll that will also elect municipal and other officials.
Out of an initial field of practically 600 hopefuls for the presidency, only seven — all males — had been authorized to run by the Guardian Council, a body of 12 clerics and jurists.
Among the prominent figures disqualified had been conservative former parliament speaker Ali Larijani. Then, two days just before the election, 3 of the seven authorized candidates dropped out of the race.
The only reformist nevertheless operating is a technocrat, central bank chief Abdolnasser Hemmati, who has promised to revive the economy and, unusually in Iran, involved his wife in campaigning.
– Reviving Nuclear Deal –
Iran has usually pointed to voter participation as proof of democratic legitimacy — but polls signal the turnout Friday might drop beneath the 43 % of last year’s parliamentary election.
If no clear winner emerges, a runoff will be held a week later.
The supreme leader two days just before the election urged voters to come out in droves to elect “a powerful president” — warning that “the Satanic power centres of the world” are attempting to undermine the ballot.
Raisi has been named in Iranian media as a attainable successor to Khamenei, who turns 82 next month.
Khamenei also served as president when he took more than in 1989 from the Islamic republic’s founder, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
For the exiled Iranian opposition and rights groups, Raisi’s name is indelibly linked with the mass executions of leftists in 1988, when he was deputy prosecutor of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court, despite the fact that he has denied involvement.
Whatever the ideological variations in Tehran, there is broad agreement that the nation of 83 million should seek an finish to the painful US sanctions in talks aiming to revive the nuclear deal.
US President Joe Biden has indicated a willingness to rejoin the agreement as soon as Washington is sure Iran will respect its nuclear commitments, some of which it has walked back from in response to Trump’s campaign.
Negotiators from the US are taking aspect indirectly in EU-chaired discussions in Vienna involving Iran and the other partners to the accord — Britain, China, France, Germany and Russia.
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