Iran votes for new president, with hardline judge tipped to win

Iran is voting in a presidential election tipped in favour of a hardline protege of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, fuelling public apathy and sparking calls for a boycott in the Islamic Republic.

Nearly 60 million eligible voters can cast their ballots by midnight (1930 GMT), and possibly for two hours longer, with results expected around noon Saturday, authorities say. But mid-day, turnout appeared far lower than Iran’s last presidential election in 2017. 

State television offered tight shots of polling places, several of which seemed to have only a handful of voters in the election’s early hours.

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei cast his ballot in Tehran for the election on Friday. 

Those passing by several polling places in Tehran said they similarly saw few voters. In some images on state TV, poll workers wore gloves and masks due to the coronavirus pandemic, with some wiping down ballot boxes with disinfectants.

State-linked opinion polling and analysts put hardline judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi as the dominant front-runner in a field of just four candidates. 

Former Central Bank chief, Abdolnasser Hemmati, is running as the race’s moderate candidate but hasn’t inspired the same support as outgoing President Hassan Rouhani, who is term-limited from seeking office again.

If elected, Raisi would be the first serving Iranian president sanctioned by the US government even before entering office over his involvement in the mass execution of political prisoners in 1988, as well as his time as the head of Iran’s internationally criticised judiciary – one of the world’s top executioners.

It also would firmly put hardliners in control across the Iranian government as negotiations in Vienna continue over trying to save Tehran’s tattered nuclear deal with world powers as it enriches uranium to the closest point yet to weapons-grade levels.

Tensions remain high with both the US and Israel, which is believed to have carried out a series of attacks targeting Iranian nuclear sites and assassinating the scientist who created its military atomic programme decades earlier.

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Thin field of candidates

Polls opened at 7 am local time for the vote, which has seen widespread public apathy after Iran's Guardian Council, under Khamenei, barred hundreds of candidates, including reformists and those aligned with Rouhani. Khamenei cast the ceremonial vote from Tehran, where he urged the public to take part.

“This day belongs to the people," he said.

There are more than 59 million eligible voters in Iran, a nation home to over 80 million people.

However, the state-linked Iranian Student Polling Agency has estimated a turnout of just 42 percent, which would be the lowest ever since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.

More hardline, less republic

Fears about a low turnout have some warning Iran may be turning away from being an Islamic Republic — a government with elected civilian leadership overseen by a supreme leader from its Shia clergy — to a country more tightly governed by its supreme leader. As supreme leader, Khamenei has final say on all matters of state and oversees its defense and atomic programme.

“This is not acceptable,” said former president Mohammad Khatami, a reformist who sought to change its theocracy from inside during his eight years in office. 

“How would this conform to being a republic or Islamic?”

For his part, Khamenei warned of “foreign plots” seeking to depress turnout in a speech on Wednesday. 

A flyer handed out Wednesday on the streets of Tehran by hardliners followed in that thought, bearing the image of Revolutionary Guard general Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a US drone strike in 2020.

“If we do not vote: Sanctions will be heavier, the US and Israel will be encouraged to attack Iran,” the leaflet warned. “Iran will be under shadow of a Syrian-style civil war and the ground will be ready for assassination of scientists and important figures.”

State television also aired footage of a polling station set up by Soleimani's graveside in the city of Kerman.

The disqualification of candidates seemed aimed at preventing anyone other than Raisi from winning the election, as Khatami did in 1997 by surprisingly beating a man favoured by Khamenei. That’s coupled with public anger for Rouhani, whose signature 2015 nuclear deal collapsed after then-President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the accord in 2018.

Iran’s already ailing economy has suffered since, with double-digit inflation and mass unemployment.

The vote “is set to be the least competitive election in the Islamic Republic’s history,” wrote Torbjorn Soltvedt, an analyst at the risk consultancy firm Verisk Maplecroft. “The election is heavily stacked in favour of candidates from the theocratic and hard-line end of Iran’s political spectrum; there will be little need for the more overt forms of election fraud that characterized the turbulent re-election of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009.”

The decision to limit participation comes as whoever wins likely will serve two four-year terms as nearly every Iranian president has since the revolution. That means they may be at the helm at what could be one of the most-crucial moments for the country in decades — the death of the 82-year-old Khamenei.

Already, speculation has mounted that Raisi may be a contender for the position, as well as Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba, who is believed to have close ties to Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard.

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