Reformist, ultraconservative qualify for Iran runoff election

Iran's sole reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian and ultraconservative Saeed Jalili have qualified for a runoff presidential election after leading in the first round, an official said on Saturday.

Pezeshkian got more than 10,400,000 votes and Jalili, a former nuclear negotiator, has more than 9,400,000, said Mohsen Eslami, spokesman of Iran's election authority.

"None of the candidates could garner the absolute majority of the votes, therefore, the first and second contenders who got the most votes will be referred" for the second round, scheduled for next Friday, Eslami told a press conference.

Out of around 61 million eligible voters, some 24,500,000 voters headed to the polls, he added, with a turnout of around 40 percent — the lowest yet in the history of the Islamic republic.

Out of Iran's 13 previous presidential elections since the Islamic revolution in 1979, only one has led to runoffs in 2005.

Conservative parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf received about 3,383,340 votes and Mostafa Pourmohammadi, a conservative cleric, had 206,397 votes.

The election authority counted a total of 1,056,159 spoiled ballots.

The elections were originally scheduled for 2025 but were brought forward by the death of ultraconservative president Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash last month.

The Guardian Council, which vets electoral candidates in the Islamic republic, had originally approved six contenders.

But a day ahead of the election, two candidates — the ultraconservative mayor of Tehran Alireza Zakani and Raisi's vice president Amir-Hossein Ghazizadeh-Hashemi — dropped out of the race.

In the 2021 elections that brought Raisi to power, the Council disqualified many reformists and moderates,...