There are now two candidates for the second round of Iran’s presidential election. They are reformist lawmaker and former health minister Masoud Pezheshkian and Said Jalili, a hardliner and loyalist of the country’s supreme leader, Khamenei. There were glimpses of a pitched battle between the two candidates. The second round of presidential elections will be held in the country on July 5. Qatar-based media Al Jazeera reported this news.
In the last June 28 election, no candidate could secure more than the required 50 percent of votes. Iran’s election office spokesman Mohsen Islami announced the election results on Saturday. In a nationally televised press conference, he said only 40 percent of the vote was cast in Friday’s election.
Iran’s Ministry of Interior has said that the country’s presidential election has seen the lowest voter turnout since the 1979 revolution. Besides, Iran’s presidential election has been held in the second round for the second time since the revolution.
Pezhekshkian is leading in Friday’s election with 1.4 million votes. And Jalili got 94 lakh votes.
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Massoud Pezeshkian
Iran’s only reformist president, Massoud Pezheshkian, was born on September 29, 1954. Pezheshkian, 70, is a heart surgeon. From 2001 to 2005, he was the health minister of Iran’s former reformist President Mohammad Khatami’s government. Since 2008, he has been elected as a member of parliament from the northwestern city of Tabriz in Iran. He was declared ineligible for the 2021 presidential election. Pezeshkian was criticized for the Iranian government’s role in the 2022 death of Masha Amini, an Iranian Kurdish teenager in police custody.
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Said Jalili
Jalili was born in 1965 to a middle-class family in Mashhad, Iran. He lost his right leg while fighting for the Guards in the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s. Said Jalili, 58, is widely recognized for his ultra-conservative and anti-Western stance. He is close to Iran’s supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Jalili currently serves as one of Khamenei’s representatives on the Supreme National Security Council, Iran’s top security body. Also worked in the mediation of the Iran nuclear deal. He came third in the 2013 presidential election. However, in 2021, Jalili withdrew from the competition by supporting Ibrahim Raisi.
#Glimpses #JaliliPezeshkian #showdown