Iran yesterday began voting in a presidential election tipped in the favor of a hardline protege of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, fueling public apathy and sparking calls for a boycott in the Islamic Republic.
State-linked opinion polling and analysts put hardline Iranian Chief Justice Ebrahim Raisi as the front-runner in a field of just four candidates.
Former Bank of Iran governor Abdolnasser Hemmati is running as the race’s moderate candidate, but has not inspired the same support as outgoing Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who cannot run for re-election due to a term limit.
Photo: Reuters
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 criticized judiciary — one of the world’s top executioners.
It would also firmly put hardliners in control across the Iranian government as negotiations in Vienna continue over a tattered nuclear deal between world powers and Tehran, which has reportedly enriched uranium to the closest point yet to weapons-grade levels.
Tensions remain high with the US and Israel, which is believed to have carried out a series of attacks targeting Iranian nuclear sites and assassinating a scientist who created the country’s military atomic program decades earlier.
Polls opened at 7am for the vote, which has seen widespread public apathy after a panel 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.
“Through the participation of the people, the country and the Islamic ruling system will win great points in the international arena, but the ones who benefit first are the people themselves,” Khamenei said. “Go ahead, choose and vote.”
Raisi, wearing a black turban that identifies him in Shiite tradition as a direct descendant of the Prophet Mohammed, voted from a mosque in southern Tehran, waving to those gathered to cast ballots.
There are more than 59 million eligible voters in Iran, a nation home to more than 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.
Fears about a low turnout prompted warnings that Iran might be turning away from being an Islamic Republic — a government with elected civilian leadership overseen by a supreme leader from its Shiite 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 Iran’s defense and atomic program.
“This is not acceptable,” said former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami, a reformist who sought to change Iran’s theocracy from inside during his eight years in office. “How would this conform to being a republic or Islamic?”
For his part, Khamenei on Wednesday warned of “foreign plots” seeking to depress turnout.
A flyer handed out that day on the streets of Tehran by hardliners followed in that thought, bearing the image of the late Iranian major general Qassem Soleimani, who was killed in a US drone strike last year.
“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.”
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 hardliner favored by Khamenei.
That has coupled with public anger against Rouhani, whose signature 2015 nuclear deal collapsed after then-US president Donald Trump in 2018 unilaterally withdrew Washington from the accord. Iran’s 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 risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft Inc. “The election is heavily stacked in favor of candidates from the theocratic and hardline 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 [then-Iranian president] Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009.”
The decision to limit participation comes as the winner would likely serve two four-year terms as nearly every Iranian president has since the revolution.
That means that they might be at the helm at what could be one of the most crucial moments for the country in decades, which would come when the 82-year-old Khamenei dies.
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