Hardline cleric wins presidency as key talks await

TEHRAN, Iran — Iran’s ultraconservative judiciary chief, Ebrahim Raisi, won a landslide victory in the county’s presidential election after a vote that many Iranians skipped, seeing it as rigged in his favor.

The Interior Ministry announced the final results Saturday, saying Raisi had won with nearly 18 million of 28.9 million ballots cast in the voting a day earlier. Turnout was 48.8% — a significant decline from the last presidential election, in 2017.

Huge swaths of moderate and liberalleaning Iranians sat out the election, saying that the campaign had been engineered to put Raisi in office or that voting would make little difference. He had been expected to win handily despite late attempts by the more moderate reformist camp to consolidate support behind their main candidate: Abdolnasser Hemmati, a former central bank governor.

The Interior Ministry said Hemmati came in third with around 2.4 million votes, after the secondplace finisher, Mohsen Rezaee, a former commander in chief of Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard who won around 3.4 million votes.

There were also about 3.7 million “white” ballots, or ballots cast without any candidate’s name written in. Some Iranians said they turned in blanks as a way to protest the lack of candidates who represented their views.

Raisi, 60, is a hardline cleric favored by Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and has been seen as his possible successor. He has a record of grave human rights abuses, including accusations of playing a role in the mass execution of political opponents in 1988, and is currently under U.S. sanctions.

His background appears unlikely to hinder the renewed negotiations between the United States and Iran over restoring a 2015 agreement to limit Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile programs in exchange for lifting American economic sanctions. Raisi has said he will remain committed to the deal and do all he can to remove sanctions.

Key policies such as the nuclear deal are decided by the supreme leader, who has the last word on all important matters of state. However,

Raisi’s conservative views will make it more difficult for the United States to reach additional deals with Iran and extract concessions on critical issues such as the country’s missile program, its backing of proxy militias around the Middle East and human rights.

Atta Kenare / AFP / Getty Images A woman holds a poster of Iran’s newly elected president, Ebrahim Raisi, with text in Persian reading “Government of the people, strong Iran,” as supporters celebrate his victory in Tehran.