According to data announced on Saturday by Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli, Iran’s ultraconservative cleric Ebrahim Raisi was elected president with just under 62% of the vote.
According to him, 48.8% of the more than 59 million eligible voters voted in Friday’s presidential election, which is a record low for an Islamic republic presidential election.
Mohsen Rezai, a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, came in second by a significant margin with 11.8 percent of the vote.
He was followed in third place by Abdolnasser Hemmati, the last remaining reformer in the race, who received 8.4 percent of the vote.
Another ultraconservative, Amirhossein Ghazizadeh-Hashemi, came in fourth place with 3.5 percent of the vote.
Over 3.7 million ballots were ruled invalid, which is more votes than second-placed Rezai received.
Raisi rose to notoriety in 1980, when he was 20 years old, when he was appointed Prosecutor General of Karaj. From 2004 to 2014, he served as the Prosecutor of Tehran and the First Deputy to the Head of the Judiciary, before becoming the Prosecutor General of Iran from 2014 to 2016.
Raisi was named head of Iran’s judiciary in 2019, a move that raised concerns due to his role in the mass executions of thousands of political detainees during the Iran-Iraq war in 1988.
Raisi is also linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a paramilitary organisation (IRGC). Qassem Soleimani, the former head of the IRGC’s Quds Force, was killed in an airstrike blamed on the United States in 2020. In 2019, the US classified the Quds Force as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
Many people did not vote this time because they believe the elections are rigged and they don’t trust the election watchdog, the Guardian Council (a panel of 12 members, including six clerics and six jurists appointed by the Supreme Leader), which disqualified some of the public’s favorite candidates.
