Iran: 2 candidates drop out on eve of presidential election

Two candidates dropped out of Iran’s presidential election on Thursday, a day ahead of the landmark vote, Reuters has reported. They called for unity among forces supporting the country’s Islamic revolution, said state media.

Iranian’s tightly controlled election on Friday follows Ebrahim Raisi’s death in a helicopter crash last month. The outcome is expected to influence the succession to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the top decision-maker in country.

Tehran’s Mayor Alireza Zakani and head of the Martyrs’ Foundation Amirhossein Ghazizadeh-Hashemi were the two candidates to pull out of the election. They were expected to win just 1.7 per cent and 2 per cent of the votes respectively, according to a 22-23 June poll carried out by the Iran Students Polling Centre.

Their departure leaves four presidential candidates. Zakani urged the two most prominent hard-liners to join forces to prevent moderate Masoud Pezeshkian from winning.

“I call upon Saeed Jalili and Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf to unite and not leave the demands of the revolutionary forces unanswered,” Zakani wrote on X, referring to the former nuclear negotiator and his hard-line rival, parliament speaker and former head of the powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Pezeshkian is a former health minister. He has the endorsement of Iran’s politically side-lined reformist camp that advocates detente with the West, but his chances are unclear, with dissidents within and outside Iran calling for an election boycott.

READ: Iran and Bahrain agree on mechanism for releasing frozen funds