After President Ebrahim Raisi’s death in a helicopter crash, two candidates have announced their withdrawal ahead of the snap election. Due to the fact that campaigning ended one day before the vote in Iran’s presidential election, two candidates have withdrawn from the race. In a post on X on Thursday, Tehran’s mayor, Alireza Zakani, indicated that he was withdrawing.
The 53-year-old Amir-Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi was the first to withdraw his candidacy. The state-run IRNA news agency reported that he did so on Wednesday night and urged other candidates to do the same “so that the front of the revolution will be strengthened.” Following the death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in May, the snap election will be held on Friday.
The election for the next president was scheduled for 2025. One of Raisi’s vice presidents was Hashemi. He ran for president in 2021, but he came in last place with less than one million votes. Zeina Khodr of Al Jazeera reported from Tehran that Hashemi’s decision to withdraw does not significantly contribute to the conservative camp’s unification.
The conservative camp remains divided due to the fact that two hardliners, former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, are fighting over the same bloc. Khodr stated, “that did not happen,” but there were hopes that one would withdraw in support of the other. Ghalibaf and Jalili, both conservatives, stand out as the frontrunners.
Ghalibaf, a former commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) air force, has been speaker of parliament for four years. Prior to that, he served as chief of police and mayor of Tehran from 2005 to 2017. He ran for president in 2005, 2013, and 2017, but lost to Raisi in the end. Jalili, the direct representative of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to the country’s Supreme National Security Council, opted out of the 2021 election in favor of Raisi, who won almost unanimously.
Masoud Pezeshkian, a cardiac surgeon and the only reformist, has allied himself with the previous administration of President Hassan Rouhani, who negotiated Iran’s nuclear agreement with world powers in 2015. In recent days, Khamenei has called for the “maximum” number of people to vote.
According to Khodr, Pezeshkian still has a chance of winning, “but it will all depend on voter turnout, and what we’ve seen in previous elections is that there have been record low numbers of people heading to the polling station.”
Pezeshkian’s chances of winning are still very good. With Israel’s war on Gaza and Iran’s first direct attack on Israel in April, Iran’s nuclear deal, which promised to open the country to the rest of the world nearly a decade ago, now faces high inflation, crushing economic sanctions, and a much more uncertain Middle East.
