In the lead-up to the election, Iran’s main reformist coalition supported Pezeshkian, with endorsements by former presidents Mohammad Khatami and Hassan Rouhani, a moderate.
“The reformists brought out the big guns and tried their best to mobilise their base,” Vaez said on social media platform X, but “it was simply insufficient”.
Likewise, the conservatives failed to garner sufficient votes “despite the tremendous resources they deployed,” he added.
Vaez pointed out that the combined votes of Jalili and conservative parliamentary speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, who came in third, totalled 12.8 million.
That figure was well below Raisi’s nearly 18 million votes in the 2021 election.
Of the 61 million eligible voters, only about 40 per cent cast ballots, marking a record-low turnout in the Islamic Republic where some people have lost faith in the process.
More than one million ballots were spoiled.
For Vaez, the decline in turnout, from around 49 per cent in 2021, was “a real embarrassment for the leadership” in Iran, where ultimate political power lies with the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
