Iran heads to presidential runoffs after low turnout election

Iran's Masoud Pezeshkian and Saeed Jalili have qualified for a runoff presidential election after leading in the first round of voting. 

Pezeshkian, seen as more moderate in his social and foreign policies, got more than 10,400,000 votes in this week's ballot while Jalili, a former nuclear negotiator considered more conservative, has more than 9,400,000, Iran's election authority announced on Saturday.

"None of the candidates could garner the absolute majority of the votes, therefore, the first and second contenders who got the most votes will be referred" for the second round, scheduled for next Friday, Eslami said.

Out of around 61 million eligible voters, some 24,500,000 voters headed to the polls, he added, with a turnout of around 40 percent - the lowest yet in the history of the Islamic republic.

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Out of Iran's 13 previous presidential elections since the Islamic revolution in 1979, only one has led to runoffs in 2005.

Conservative parliament speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf received about 3,383,340 votes and Mostafa Pourmohammadi, a conservative cleric, had 206,397 votes. 

The elections were originally scheduled for 2025 but were brought forward by the death of conservative president Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash last month.

The Guardian Council, which vets electoral candidates in the Islamic Republic, had originally approved six contenders. But a day ahead of the election, two candidates - the ultraconservative mayor of Tehran Alireza Zakani and Raisi's vice president Amir-Hossein Ghazizadeh-Hashemi - dropped out of the race.

Pezeshkian, 69, is a heart surgeon who served as health minister under Iran's last reformist president Mohammad Khatami. In recent campaigning, Pezeshkian called for "constructive relations" with Washington and European countries in order to "get Iran out of its isolation". 

Meanwhile, Jalili, Iran's former nuclear negotiator, has maintained his uncompromising anti-West stance. The 58-year-old has held several senior positions in the Islamic Republic, including in the office of Supreme Leader of Iran Ali Khamenei in the early 2000s. He is currently one of Khamenei's representatives in the Supreme National Security Council, Iran's highest security body. 

Friday's vote took place amid heightened regional tensions over the Gaza war, a dispute with the West over Iran's nuclear program and domestic discontent over the state of Iran's sanctions-hit economy.

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