Hardliner Ebrahim Raisi is the next Iranian President.
Gatekeepers News reports that Raisi won Iran’s presidential election after securing 62% of the votes.
The 60-year-old president-elect is under United States sanctions and has been linked to past executions of political prisoners. He is Iran’s top judge and holds ultra-conservative views.
He has promised to ease unemployment and work to remove U.S sanctions that have contributed to economic hardship for ordinary Iranians and caused widespread discontent.
When inaugurated in early August, Raisi will become the second-highest-ranking official in Iran after the supreme leader.
In Iran’s political system it is the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the top religious cleric, who has the final say on all state matters.
Raisi has served as a prosecutor for most of his career and held powerful and high-ranking positions from an early age. He was already serving as the chief prosecutor of the city of Karaj when he was just 20-year-old.
He was appointed head of the judiciary in 2019, two years after he lost by a landslide to Hassan Rouhani in the last presidential election.
Raisi has presented himself as the best person to fight corruption and inequality, and solve Iran’s economic problems. “Our people’s grievances over shortcomings are real,” he said as he cast his vote in Tehran.
Iranians and rights groups have fingered the President-elect for alleged role in the mass executions of political prisoners in 1988, when he was 27 years old.
According to Amnesty International, Raisi is part of a “death committee” – one of four judges who oversaw secret death sentences for about 5,000 prisoners in jails near Tehran.
“That Ebrahim Raisi has risen to the presidency instead of being investigated for the crimes against humanity of murder, enforced disappearance and torture, is a grim reminder that impunity reigns supreme in Iran,” said Secretary-General of Amnesty International, Agnès Callamard.
Raisi has repeatedly denied his role in the death sentences but said they were justified because of a fatwa, or religious ruling, by former supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini.
About the election
The election was believed to have been engineered to favour Raisi.
About 600 aspirants, including 40 women, registered to be candidates in the election but only seven men were approved in April by the 12 jurists and theologians on the Guardian Council, an unelected body that has the ultimate decision with regard to candidates’ qualifications.
Gatekeepers News reports that three of those candidates later pulled out before polling day.
One of those that withdrew, reformist candidate Mohsen Mehralizadeh had insinuated that the vote would be a foregone conclusion, saying during a candidates’ TV debate that the ruling clerics had aligned “sun, moon and the heavens to make one particular person the president,” according to The Economist.
Also, former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, one of those barred from running, said in a video message that he would not vote, declaring: “I do not want to have a part in this sin.”
