Moderate candidate Masoud Pezeshkian, who has promised to open Iran to the world and provide the freedoms its people crave, won Friday’s presidential runoff, an Iranian source told Reuters.
“The counting of votes has ended and the opposing candidates have been informed of the result. Pezeshkian is about three million votes ahead of his staunch rival Said Jalili,” said a source who wished to remain anonymous, reports Al Jazeera.
Earlier, the Ministry of the Interior announced that Pezeshkian was leading the race according to the first results, adding that the first reports showed that the turnout was about 50 percent higher than in the first round.
The runoff followed a June 28 vote with a historically low turnout, when more than 60 percent of Iranian voters abstained from an early election to succeed Ebrahim Raisi, following his death in a helicopter crash.
It is a tight race between the modest reformist Pezeshkian, the only moderate in the initial group of four candidates, and the hardline former nuclear negotiator Djalili, a staunch advocate of deepening ties with Russia and China.
Pezeshkian advocates engagement in constructive talks with Western powers to revive the JCPOA nuclear deal and to lift the sanctions that he says have crippled the Iranian economy since the withdrawal of the United States from the agreement in 2018. He has not offered any concrete plans for such a move which requires the approval of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, Iranintl writes.
He has also insisted that Iran needs to accede to international conventions prescribed by the anti-money laundering Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to allow international banking ties. Iran has been on FATF’s blacklist since February 2020.
