Iran is likely to get its new President by Saturday morning, according to Iraj Elahi, the Islamic Republic’s envoy to India.
“Today, we are holding the second round of the presidential election. More than 700 polling centres are accepting the votes of the Iranians. We hope that by tomorrow morning, we will have a new President,” Elahi told news agency ANI after casting his vote at a special polling centre in New Delhi.
The Iranian ambassador further stressed that the Asian nation’s foreign and internal policies ‘will not change.’
The presidential election, a snap poll, was necessitated due to the demise of then President Ebrahim Raisi, who was among the victims of a May 19 helicopter crash. Raisi, the Islamic Republic’s eighth President, was elected in 2021, and the next election was originally scheduled in 2025.
Friday’s second round of polling was held as no candidate secured a majority in the first leg on June 28. Also, the voter turnout in the first phase stood at only 39.93%, the lowest for any major election in the country since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Of the four candidates who participated in the first round, the two who advanced to the second and final leg are Masoud Pezeshkian and Saeed Jalili. While the former is a reformist, the latter is a hardline conservative. In the first phase, they secured 10,415,991 and 9,473,298 votes, respectively.
Meanwhile, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s Supreme Leader, also appealed to the people to come out and vote, pointing to how this would be the ‘deciding round’ of the polling process.
