(Bloomberg) — Iran’s presidential runoff opened on Friday with the election’s only reformist candidate, Masoud Pezeshkian, facing off against anti-Western Islamist Saeed Jalili in the race to run the country’s government.
The two men cast their votes around mid-morning in Tehran, choosing polling stations in working-class neighborhoods on the outskirts of the metropolis.
The rivals have spent the past four days campaigning across the Islamic Republic, trying to rally support from an electorate that mostly shunned the ballot box in last week’s first round. They’ve clashed in televised debates over the future of the now-defunct nuclear deal, internet censorship and how to revive the struggling economy.
Pezeshkian, a 69-year-old lawmaker and heart surgeon by training, and 58-year-old Jalili, an ex-chief negotiator on the nuclear program, are battling to take over from the government of late President Ebrahim Raisi, whose death in a helicopter crash in May triggered the snap election.
Polls opened at 8 a.m. local time and are scheduled to close at 6 p.m., but can be extended to midnight. Early results are expected on Saturday morning.
The election comes at a time of unprecedented opposition to Iran’s ruling clerical establishment and as turmoil and conflict dominate the Middle East.
Tension between Iran and Israel has escalated since Israel started an ongoing military assault on Gaza — a response to the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas, which is backed by Tehran and considered a terrorist organization by the US. The two countries traded direct fire in April, though stopped short of a full-blown war.
‘A Coin Flip’
The record low turnout of about 40% in last Friday’s vote underscored the crisis of legitimacy that’s been facing the Islamic Republic and its ultimate ruler, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Widespread demonstrations and a violent uprising in 2022 have rattled the ruling clerics and empowered security forces to suppress dissent as much as possible.
Underscoring the extent to which those protests still loom large for many voters, several families of those killed by Iranian security forces in the unrest have used social media to publicly boycott the election, including the father or Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman whose death in police custody sparked the uprising.
“Regardless of who wins the runoff, it is clear that the majority of Iranians have little faith in the governing system,” Gregory Brew, Iran Analyst at the Eurasia Group, said in a note.
The vote is “essentially a coin flip, as both contenders have a plausible route to victory,” Brew said, adding that data from the first round shows Pezeshkian gained a healthy number of votes in rural areas which normally back more conservative candidates.
While Pezeshkian came first in the initial round by about a million votes, he didn’t win an outright majority. The two candidates who missed out on the run off, both hard liners, urged their supporters to back Jalili in the second round.
That means Pezeshkian has to persuade the deeply disillusioned majority who chose not to vote last week to pledge their support for him to ensure a reformist victor.
Hard Liners Divided?
But there are signs the conservative and hard line political factions are divided over who to back.
Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, the current speaker of parliament and former Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps commander who came third in last week’s first round, told his supporters to back Jalili. Yet on Tuesday, several newspapers in Iran speculated his supporters are in fact split — with a fair number more likely to back Pezeshkian out of fear that Jalili’s policies would be bad for the economy and further isolate Iran.
Khamenei hasn’t publicly endorsed either candidate but in a speech last week he advised voters to steer clear of those who believe the country would be better off by engaging with the US.
That was broadly interpreted by the Iranian media as a criticism of Pezeshkian, who wants to revive the deal with world powers over Iran’s atomic activities — which would enable relief from sanctions — and has emphasized the need for the country to be run by qualified experts rather than men like Jalili, who are more driven by religion and ideology.
Whoever wins, they may have to deal with the return of Donald Trump as US president after November’s elections. Trump’s foreign policy during his initial 2017-2021 term was defined by a hostile “maximum pressure” strategy against Iran that destabilized the Persian Gulf, rattled oil markets and almost triggered a direct war with the Islamic Republic.
It was Trump who walked away from the nuclear deal agreed to by his predecessor, Barack Obama.
–With assistance from Arsalan Shahla and Chris Miller.
(Updates with latest on voting and election boycotts starting in second paragraph.)
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