Ebrahim Raisi, a conservative cleric and judiciary chief, has won Iran’s presidential election, in a landslide victory that will give regime hardliners full control over all branches of the state for the first time in almost a decade. Raisi, who many Iranians believe was the favoured candidate of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, secured almost 18m votes after 90 per cent of ballots in Friday’s election were counted. His closest rival, Mohsen Rezaei, a senior conservative general, garnered just 3-3m votes, while the sole reformist candidate,
Abdolnaser Hemmati, a former central bank governor, took 2.4m.
The cleric’s victory means that hardliners, who won a sweeping majority in parliamentary elections last year and control the judiciary and the military, are now at their most powerful since 2013. Reformists, who favour greater engagement with the west, have been pushed to the margins. The election was held at a critical time for the Islamic republic and the region. The Biden administration is seeking to ease tension in the Middle East, which was inflamed by Donald Trump’s decision in 2018 to unilaterally withdraw the US from the nuclear accord with Iran and impose sanctions on the nation.
Raisi has said his government would continue negotiations with the deal’s remaining signatories — the UK, France, Germany, Russia and China. But hardliners will want to negotiate on their own terms as the Reformist politician second and final term of President Hassan Rouhani’s centrist government ends in August. The election of Raisi, who has headed the judiciary for the past two years and was the subject of sanctions by the Trump administration in 2019, as it targeted dozens of senior regime officials, risks complicating those talks.