Iranians vote to replace president killed in helicopter crash, but apathy remains high

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates – Iranians voted in a snap election on Friday to choose a successor to the late President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash last month, as the Islamic Republic reels from a general sense of popular apathy after years of economic woes, mass protests and tensions in the Middle East.

Voters will be choosing between hardline candidates and a little-known politician who is part of Iran’s reform movement that seeks to change the Shiite theocracy from within. As has been the case since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, women and those calling for radical change are excluded from the election, and the election itself is not monitored by internationally recognized observers.

The vote came as the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza has ratcheted up tensions in the Middle East. In April, Iran launched its first direct attack on Israel over the Gaza war, while militia groups that Tehran arms in the region – such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Yemen’s Houthi rebels – have become involved in the fighting and escalated their attacks.

Meanwhile, Iran continues to enrich uranium to near weapons-grade levels and has sufficient stockpiles to build multiple nuclear weapons should it choose to do so.

Although Iran’s 85-year-old Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has the final say in all state affairs, presidents can steer the country’s policy toward confrontation or negotiations with the West.

However, given the record low voter turnout in the last election, it remains unclear how many Iranians will participate in Friday’s vote.

Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi, who is in charge of overseeing the election, announced that all polling stations had opened at 8 a.m. local time. Khamenei cast one of the first votes of the election and called on people to go and vote. State television later broadcast images of polling stations across the country where queues were at modest heights.

Analysts describe the election campaign as broadly a three-way battle. There are two hardliners, former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili and Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf. Then there is reformist candidate Masoud Pezeshkian, who has allied himself with figures such as former President Hassan Rouhani, under whose government Tehran signed the landmark nuclear deal with world powers in 2015.

The nuclear agreement eventually collapsed and the hardliners regained full control.

Higher turnout could boost the chances of Pezeshkian, a 69-year-old heart surgeon who campaigns for a return to the nuclear deal and better relations with the West. But it remains unclear whether Pezeshkian could gain the momentum needed to persuade voters to turn out. There have been calls for a boycott, including from imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi.

More than 61 million Iranians over the age of 18 are eligible to vote, about 18 million of whom are between 18 and 30 years old.

According to Iranian law, a winner must receive more than 50 percent of all votes cast. If this does not happen, a runoff election between the two leading candidates will take place a week later. There has only been one runoff election in Iranian history, in 2005, when hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad defeated former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Raisi, 63, died in the May 19 helicopter crash that also killed the country’s foreign minister and others. He was considered a protégé of Khamenei and a potential successor as supreme leader. Yet many knew him for his involvement in the mass executions Iran carried out in 1988 and his role in the bloody crackdown on dissidents following protests over the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman who was arrested by police for allegedly not wearing the mandatory headscarf (hijab) in accordance with the law.

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Karimi reported from Tehran, Iran.