Iran is heading to a runoff election in a week’s time after the reformist lawmaker Masoud Pezeshkian secured a narrow lead over the hardline former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili but failed to secure more than 50% of the votes.
Turnout may end up low as 40%, a record low for an Iranian presidential election since the revolution in 1979.
The scale of the boycott is a rebuff for the regime, which had repeatedly urged Iranians to show their commitment to the Islamic regime by voting.
Turnout in the 2001 presidential election was officially recorded at 48.8% with 24.9 million voting.
The initial results showed Pezeshkian received 10.45m votes, Jalili 9.47m and the other leading conservative Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf 3.38m. A fourth candidate, Mostafa Pourmohammadi, a former justice minister who ran a wildcard campaign, won only 206,000. A total of 24,735,185 people voted.
As the first vote tallies were announced, Pezeshkian was just behind Jalili, but he then overtook him and pushed ahead.
A runoff on Friday seems inevitable and will offer a straight ideological choice between Pezeshkian and Jalili.
Unless Pezeshkian can galvanise more voters to turn out, on the basis that the first round proved that he has a viable chance of winning and can change Iran, the reformist is likely to lose a runoff. The bulk, but not all, of the Ghalibaf votes are predicted to switch to Jalili. The rivalry between Ghalibaf and Jalili – both personal and ideological – was enough to prevent them reaching a pre-polling pact.
The snap election was called after the death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash. In 2021, Raisi secured 18m votes, only 6m less than the total number of votes recorded as cast in 2024. Detailed comparisons showed that turnout was down in 2021 in almost all provinces except in Tehran and Qom.
Abbas Akhoundi, a leading reformist, said: “About 60% of voters did not participate in the elections. Their message was clear. They object to the institutionalised discrimination in the existing governance and do not accept that they are second-class citizens and that a minority impose their will on the majority of Iranian society as first-class citizens.
“A large part of Iranian society does not see a place for itself in the ruling political institutions. Therefore, they had the right not to participate in the elections. The government should know that, if this procedure continues, this part of society will get bigger because even some of those who voted agree with this group.”
Six candidates, including five Conservatives, two of whom dropped out on the eve of the poll, were approved as qualified to stand by the Guardian Council, an unelected constitutional watchdog whose members are directly and indirectly appointed by supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The decision to allow a reformist to stand was seen as a concession by the regime, which needed a more competitive election to try to lure voters to the polls.
Iran needs leaders with legitimacy as it supports resistance movements across the Middle East, confronts unelected Gulf monarchies and challenges the west over the purpose and scale of its currently expanding nuclear programme.
On Friday, the UN nuclear watchdog reported Tehran had installed four of eight new centrifuges at its Fordow facilities, speeding its uranium enrichment facilities.
The reformist movement that stretches back many decades inside Iran was divided over whether to participate, with many leading figures including political prisoners, such as the Nobel prize winner Narges Mohammadi, calling for a boycott.
Other jailed thinkers on the left such as Majid Tavakoli urged voters from behind bars not to vote.
Judging by the makeup of the sometimes large crowds at Pezeshkian’s rallies, the reformists seem to have failed to persuade the younger generation demanding greater cultural freedom that their movement, or the route of the ballot box, offers real change. Some describe Gen Z Iran as depoliticised, and others simply conscious that elected politicians in Iran do not have controls over the levers of power that remain with the supreme leader, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.
Pezeshkian has used video town hall meetings to engage with students and promised no crackdown on those who refuse to wear the hijab. But at the heart of his campaign has been a call that the country’s economic travails will not end unless it engages with western economies, including through renegotiating the Iranian nuclear deal. Actively supported by the former foreign minister Javad Zarif, he has accused hardliners of taking Iran down an ideological, cultural and economic cul-de-sac.
The big question now will be whether those around the supreme leader will hold an honest discussion about the turnout and self-evident alienation of Iranians.
One Tehran citizen, Kianoosh Sanjari, struck by the contrast between the official TV reports of excitement at the polls and what he had seen on the streets of the capital, said he travelled to 14 polling booths and did not find more than five people queueing to vote. He said he then went to Laleh (Tulip) Park, one of his favourite haunts in Tehran, and found old men playing chess under a gazebo, crowds of youngsters playing badminton football and volleyball, and children practising slacklining.
“I don’t know about the situation in other cities, but I can definitely say that the absolute majority of people in Tehran ignored the presidential appointments of the Islamic Republic of Iran and did not participate in them.”
He added: “All the domestic media of Iran served to heat up the oven of this election. Both sides were given a chance to speak their hearts out (and not to someone like me). Both factions sent text messages to the people. They conveyed their message to the people in all social networks.
“Call it discouragement, despair, indifference or collective consciousness.”