The head of the Iranian Judiciary, Ebrahim Raisi, leads by a very wide difference the first official results of the presidential elections this Friday and has already begun to receive the congratulations of his rivals in fulfillment of the forecasts that gave the powerful cleric, great representative of the conservative Iranian establishment, the victory in the elections.
For now, the spokesman for the National Electoral Commission of Iran, Yamal Arf, has confirmed that Raisi leads the first official estimates very broadly, with 17.8 million votes received, well ahead of Rezaei (3.3 million votes), Hemati (2.4 million) and Hashemi, who would have received close to a million votes, reports the official Iranian news agency IRNA.
In the absence of the final data -which could be released throughout today or, more likely, on Sunday-, Raisi has already received early this Saturday the congratulations of the rest of the candidates in the running, Abdolnaser Hemati, Ghazizadeh Hashemi and Mohsen Rezaei, according to the semi-official Iranian agency Fars.
Congratulations on your election as the thirteenth president of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The noble and proud people of Iran rightly hope to live a life full of hope, peace and prosperity, ”Hemati said, according to the information managed by the Chabar news portal, in comments collected by Fars.
clear winner
In fact, the president of Iran himself, Hasan Rohani, has already announced that the elections have a winner, although he has refrained from giving Raisi’s name. “It is clear who has obtained the necessary votes,” as stated by the president during his weekly control meeting on the coronavirus pandemic, cited by the same agency.
The total of votes received so far is 28.6 million, approximately 50 percent of the population able to cast their ballot in elections where the participation rate is also being a scale under study as an indication of the acceptance of the establishment. Iranian clergy who rule the country.
Raisi, who has spent most of his career in the judicial apparatus, became a custodian of the Astan Quds Razavi religious foundation, the largest in the Islamic world, which makes him accumulate great power and even appear as the main favorite to succeed Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei at the head of the country.
The cleric, who was defeated by Rohani in 2017, was appointed in 2019 as head of the judicial apparatus and shortly after was appointed as vice president of the Assembly of Experts, allowing him to increase his influence.
