President of Iran: Contenders reduce to 3 ahead June 28 election

Three contenders for the elected post of President of Iran dropped their ambitions between Wednesday, June 26 and Thursday morning, leaving only three in the race.

A snap election will take place in Iran on Friday, June 28, to elect a new president who is required to fill the office that became vacant last month, May 19, when former President Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash.

Alireza Zakani, the mayor of the capital Tehran, said in a post on X on Thursday that he was backing out. Earlier, Amir-Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi dropped his candidature on Wednesday night, asking other candidates to toe his path “so that the front of the revolution will be strengthened.”

Of those still in the race, the conservative camp remains divided, as former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf remain in the fight over the same bloc.

The two stand out as frontrunners.

Bagher Ghalibaf, a former commander of the air force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, has been parliament speaker for four years.

Ghalibaf, who was the mayor of Tehran from 2005 to 2017 and the chief of police before that, had run for president in 2005, 2013 and 2017.

On his part, Saeed Jalili, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s direct representative to the country’s Supreme National Security Council, withdrew from the 2021 election in favour of Raisi, who coasted to victory.

The third contender, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, the only Shiite cleric in the election, served as Interior Minister under hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and later as Justice Minister under Hassan Rouhani.

The three appear set as Iranians count the hours to pick the successor to the late Ebrahim Raisi.

The president of Iran is elected every four years in a general election by a direct vote of all registered Iranians of voting age.

The president, the country’s highest directly elected official, is the chief of the executive branch and the second most important position after the Supreme Leader.

In the country’s peculiar political setting, the Supreme Leader, currently in the person of 85-year-old Ali Khamenei, holds much more power than the President.

When registration to run for the presidency started on 30th May, 80 people filed their candidatures for president, among them four women.

On June 9, the final list of candidates was released by the Guardian Council, which approved only six as the nominees for the election.