TEHRAN: Conservative judge Ebrahim Raisi has won the presidential election in Iran, state media reported on Saturday.
Three out of four candidates in Iran’s presidential election have conceded defeat hours before the interior ministry is expected to announce the official results. State-media reports said conservative head of the judiciary, Ebrahim Raisi, won by a wide margin.
Raisi, a protégé of Supreme Leader Ali Hosseini Khamenei, was widely seen as the frontrunner in Friday’s election marred by low turnout and the disqualification of many candidates.
Moderate candidate Abdolnaser Hemmati congratulated Raisi for winning the election. “I hope your government, under the leadership of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, will bring comfort and prosperity to our nation,” former central bank chief Hemmati said in a letter.
Raisi did not immediately acknowledge Hemmati’s concession, nor that of former Revolutionary Guard commander Mohsen Rezaei, who also conceded a loss.
The other conservative candidate, Amir Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi, explicitly congratulated Raisi. “I congratulate … Raisi, elected by the nation,” Hashemi said, quoted by Iranian media.
In a televised speech, outgoing President Hassan Rouhani congratulated “the people’s elected [president]”, without naming him.
“Because it has not been officially announced yet, I will delay the official congratulations. But it is clear who received the votes,” Rouhani said.
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Millions of Iranians voted on Friday in a contest that has been expected to hand the presidency to Raisi, a 60-year-old senior judge who is subject to US sanctions for alleged human rights abuses.
Other candidates also congratulated Raisi. The interior ministry was to announce the final results later on Saturday as the counting of the votes continued.
Raisi is a harsh critic of the West and the standard bearer of Iran’s security hawks. Raisi was appointed by Khamenei to the high-profile job of judiciary chief in 2019.
The clerical rulers had urged people to turn out and vote on Friday, but dissidents inside and abroad said popular anger over economic hardship and curbs on freedoms kept many Iranians at home.
Another deterrent for many pro-reform voters was a lack of choice, after a hardline election body barred heavyweight moderate and conservative candidates from standing.
A US State Department spokesperson said “Iranians were denied their right to choose their own leaders in a free and fair electoral process” – a likely reference to the disqualification of candidates.
