Presidential elections were held in Iran on 18 June 2021, the thirteenth since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Ebrahim Raisi, the then Chief Justice of Iran, was declared the winner in a highly controversial election. The election began with the mass disqualification of popular candidates by the Guardian Council, and broke records of the lowest turnout in Iranian electoral history (around 49%),[1] as well as had the highest share of protest blank, invalid and lost votes (around 13%)[2] despite a declaration by the Supreme Leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, considering protest voting religiously forbidden (haraam) as it would "weaken the regime."[3]Reporters Without Borders reported 42 cases of journalists being summoned or threatened for writing about candidates,[4] and the chief of the police threatened people who discouraged others to vote.[5]
The Guardian Council announced the approval of seven candidates after the wide disqualification of prominent candidates, including Ali Larijani, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (the former president of Iran), and Eshaq Jahangiri (the Incumbent first Vice President), among others,[6] which provoked many activists and candidates to call for boycotting the election,[7] including Ahmadinejad, who said that he would neither participate nor recognize the election. Hassan Rouhani, the incumbent Iranian president, could not run for re-election under the constitution of Iran as he had already served his maximum two consecutive terms.
Considered a "show election" to elect the handpicked candidate of the Iranian Supreme Leader,[8] the elections were the first in Iranian history in which the reported number of invalid ballots, 3.84 million, outnumbered every non-winning candidate; the second-placed Mohsen Rezaee received 3.44 million votes.[9] The elections were widely described as "neither free nor fair", a "sham", and a "selection" by different international human rights organizations, such as Human Rights Watch[10] and the Center for Human Rights in Iran,[8] and others called for an investigation into Raisi's role as an overseer in the 1988 executions of Iranian political prisoners.[11][10]
The President of Iran is elected for a four-year term by universal adult suffrage with a minimum voting age of 18. The presidential term is renewable once in a consecutive manner. It is the country's highest directly elected official, the chief of the executive branch, and the second most important position after the Supreme Leader. Under Iran's political system, the Supreme Leader holds much more power than the President.[12]
According to Islamic Republic of Iran's constitution, any Iranian citizen who believes in Shia Islam, loyal to the Constitution, the ideology of Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist and the Islamic Republic can participate in election as a presidential candidate. An institution called the Election Monitoring Agency (EMA), managed by the Guardian Council vets registered candidates and selects a handful to run in the election.[13]
The Guardian Council does not publicly announce the reason for rejections of particular candidates, although those reasons are privately explained to each candidate. Women are not constitutionally restricted from running; however, all women who registered as candidates have been excluded from standing for election by the Guardian Council.[14][15] "We have not rejected any woman due to being a woman", the spokesman of the Guardian Council said. He clarified that there is no obstacle for women's registration in the elections.[16]
Those approved by the Guardian Council are put to a public vote on the weekend. The winner is the candidate who receive a majority (50% plus one) votes. If no candidate receives enough votes another election is held between the two candidates with the most votes the following Friday.[17] Iranians who voted during the election receive a stamp that indicate so on their birth certificates.[18]
According to the constitution, once the result is known, the Supreme Leader must sign the decree of the elected president, and if he refuses to sign, the elected president will not assume the presidency. So far, Supreme Leaders have always signed the decree of the elected president.[19][20] After that, the elected president must recite and sign an oath in a session of the Islamic Consultative Assembly, in the presence of the members of the Guardian Council and the head of the Supreme Court. In the Oath, the elected president must swear that he will guard the official religion (Islam), protect the Constitution and the Islamic Republic, and that he will dedicate himself to the service of the nation, its people, and its religion (among other things).[17]
1170 billion toman (approximately US$277.4 million)[30] was allocated in the national budget, of which 160 billion was allocated to the Guardian Council for oversight and supervision, and the rest (1010 billion) was for the Ministry of Interior, which actually runs the election.[31]
Polling places abroad
234 polling places were set up in 133 countries so that Iranians abroad could vote. 3.5 million members of the Iranian diaspora were eligible to vote in the election.[32][33] The Canadian government did not allow Iran to operate polling places in Canada.[34]
Candidates
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The Guardian Council is responsible for approving candidates who have registered to run. The Guardian Council disqualified over 600 applicants, including all the women who had registered, ultimately approving seven candidates, three of whom withdrew days before the election.[35]
Approved
The Interior Ministry released the official list of candidates qualified by the Guardian Council on 25 May 2021. The following seven candidates were approved by the council.[36]
Several candidates withdrew from the election, with three withdrawing after they had been approved by the Guardian Council. All the candidates who withdrew endorsed a candidate.
The government had administered 4 million COVID-19 vaccine doses, which is about 2.7% of the country's population (82.91 million).[68] Incumbent President Rouhani predicted that the virus breakout could affect voter turnout.[69][70] The government has limited the maximum number of people allowed to gather at polling places.[71]
The Election Office vaccinated staff by obtaining vaccines meant for old people.[72] Election staff are tested for COVID-19 with PCR tests.[73]
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Format
The moderator asked every candidate different random questions, regarding economics, social and political, and people's issues. Additionally, 3 TV chats were televised, hosting 7 candidates.[86][87][88][89][90][91]
The First Debate
Two moderate candidates (Hemmati and Mehralizade) faced five hardliner candidates.
Hemmati opened his speech by criticizing the fact that women and minorities were refused the right to run in the election, described the four hardliners besides Raisi as "covering" candidates, indicating that they had only participated to be defenders of Raisi in the debate and asked them to swear that they would not drop out of the election in favour of Raisi. He accused Reza'i of sabotaging the incumbent moderate government of Iran's effort to join the anti-money-laundering organization FATF and asked him whether it would be sane to solve the economic problems of Iran by taking American hostages (as Reza'i had indicated in a previous controversial interview). He asked Ra'isi, the Chief Justice of Iran and almost certain next president of Iran, to be given a promise (or a "safe conduct") not to be prosecuted after the conclusion of the elections.
Mehralizade, another moderate candidate, criticized Ra'isi for not having pursued an academic education besides having completed the six grades of school, and said that despite the respect he has for Ra'isi's Islamic Seminary Diploma, he does not believe that that is enough education for a person who wants to handle a country, and said that Ra'isi suffers from a "restless-position syndrome" (a humorous allusion to the "restless-hand syndrome" which is the Persian term for the Alien Hand Syndrome) for pursuing one high position after another. In response to this claim, Raisi asked Mehralizade "why are you jealous of my popularity among the people?".
Reza'i and Zakani, both hardliner candidates, accused Hemmati, the then Governor of the Iranian Central Bank, of having issued fiat money, and Zakani, in response to Hemmati's criticism of widespread rejection of candidates not aligned enough with the want of the Guardian Council, said "If those candidates had been approved, you would not be here".[92]
Opinion polls
Hypothetical polls
Hypothetical polls were done before the Guardian Council had announced who is approved to run. Therefore, these polls include several candidates (like Ahmadinejad) who were disqualified and are therefore ineligible to run.
These polls include all seven candidates who were approved by the Guardian Council. Note that Jalili, Mehralizadeh, and Zakani all withdrew after this poll was conducted.
The ISPA (Iranian Students Polling Agency) is considered as one of the most reliable pollsters in Iran. They correctly predicted the results of the 2017 election.[96][97] ISPA polls projected that Ebrahim Raisi was heavily favored to win the election.[98]
The declared results showed a total of 28,750,736 people cast votes (48.48% of the eligible population), including 18 million votes for the victor of the election, Ebrahim Raisi. Mohsen Rezai was the candidate receiving the most votes as a non-winner with 13.81% of the valid votes, although his votes were lower than the number of blank, invalid, or lost votes.
The results of the election broke many national records. The lowest turnout in an Iranian election in four decades (since the 1979 Iranian Revolution) was recorded,[106] the largest share of non-valid and non-received issued voted by far were recorded (13.1% of the votes were counted as invalid), the second being 2005's 4.2%,[107][2] the first time in Iranian history that no non-winner was able to break the invalid voter threshold, and the first time only a minority of the electoral roll engaged in the election.[108] In the capital city, Tehran, only around a fourth of the eligible population voted, including the cast invalid votes.[109] In some other major cities, such as Arak, Hamadan, Karaj,[110] and Ahvaz,[111] the largest number of the concurrent municipal elections votes were the invalid ones.
The exact number of votes each candidate received has not been yet released for every single Iranian province, though turnout for each is made public. The highest provincial turnout has gone to South Khorasan and the lowest one to Tehran, with around 74% and 34% respectively, and this figure does include the unusually large number of invalid/blank voters as voters.[112] In some provinces with historically high turnouts, the figures underwent a sharp drop in this election, making voters in some large provinces into a minority (made bold here), while others lost big amounts of vote while still keeping the majority. Some examples are Tehran (66% to 34%), Alborz (80% to 41%), Yazd (93% to 58%), Qazvin (83% to 52%), Mazandaran (91% to 60%), and Isfahan (74% to 43.8%). Twelve provinces in total recorded a turnout below 50%, a figure which went to no province in the previous election.[113]
Because whether an adult has participated in the previous elections or not is recorded in his/her identity card and subsequently considered in job interviews and some other situations, a large number of people have historically chosen to boycott the election and get a stamp in the ID at the same time, by voting a protest vote (voting blank or jokingly voting for non-existent/comical characters or even carrying the ballot with them out of the polling station), contributing to a very large share of votes being invalid/non-received, a phenomenon that is much more pronounced in this election (around thirteen percent of the votes being invalid).[2]
For this reason, the ratio of received valid votes to all issued ballots is occasionally calculated by some sources and compared together and/or to that of the previous elections. For example, Alborz province, which had a turnout figure close to 80% in the 2017 Iranian presidential election but fell to 41% in 2021,[113] had only 48.79% of its votes being valid,[114] which could mean that only around 20% of the eligible population of the province have voted, of which only a minority have voted for Raisi.
Upon being declared the winner, Raisi was congratulated by three of his four competitors on 19 June,[115] and president Rouhani paid a congratulatory visit to him that evening.
Jamal Arf, the head of the Election Office, announced updated details of the results after gathering details of votes from 91 ballot boxes and departments monitoring the elections across the country. Per the updated results, Raisi received more than 18 million votes. Meanwhile, 100,231 invalid votes that were cast were not collected and thus kept out of the count. While 28,989,529 turned up for the election, only 28,750,736 cast their vote.[116]
The Biden administration responded to Iran's mass disqualification of candidates for its upcoming presidential election by saying the Iranian people should be free to choose their own leaders. The statement from the White House coincides with sharp criticism of Iran's electoral system from Iranian human rights activists and U.S. conservatives, who view the election as neither free nor fair.[118]
Post-election
Internal
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei expressed contentment with the low turnout and said that blank and void votes were votes "in support for the system".[119]
Since Canada had severed ties with the Iranian government in 2012, Iranian-Canadian protesters and activists rallied at Mel Lastman Square in North York, Toronto, calling the elections a "sham".[121]
A spokesman for the Israeli foreign ministry, Lior Haiat, voiced 'grave concern' over Ebrahim Raisi, who he labeled the "most extremist president yet", and warned the new leader will increase Iran's nuclear activities.[125]
Turkish PresidentRecep Tayyip Erdoğan congratulated Raisi on his success in the presidential elections. According to the statement by Turkey's Communications Directorate, Erdoğan wished that the poll results will lead to a more prosperous Iran which he hoped that Turkey-Iran ties will further strengthen during Raisi's presidency, saying he is ready for cooperation.[130]
President of the Republic of UzbekistanShavkat Mirziyoyev congratulated Ebrahim Raisi on his victory and election, and expressed confidence in the development of bilateral relations.[131]
Iran's foreign ministry summoned the British envoy over reported violence at voting stations in the Embassy of Iran in London and Birmingham.[132][133]
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Disseminating rich Islamic culture and eliminating society from foreign decadent culture
Expanding the theoretical and disciplinary foundations of religious education
Expanding national culture and revitalizing valuable social traditions
Expressing creativity and presenting exquisite works of art or literature
Pay particular attention to the country's cultural, artistic or literary heritage, so as to be effective in its restoration, preservation and utilization
Introducing, describing, explaining, critiquing and presenting one of the artistic or literary disciplines internationally
Inventing a new style in one of the artistic or literary disciplines
Promote a culture of sacrifice and martyrdom in the community
Creating remarkable and valuable artworks to convey the ideals and values of the Islamic Revolution and the Sacred Defense to future generations
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↑ "گزارش نظرسنجی انتخابات". گَمان - گروه مطالعات افکارسنجی ایرانیان (in Persian). 6 June 2021. Archived from the original on 6 June 2021. Retrieved 6 June 2021.
↑ Source | 264822 for Raisi, 38946 for Rezai, 32801 for Hemmati, 21188 for Qazizade-Hashemi, totalling 357757, although 733170 ballots have been issued (a 48.79% validity).
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