The Iranians await, Saturday, June 19, the announcement of the official results of the presidential election announced won in advance for the ultraconservative Ebrahim Raïssi against a backdrop of discontent in the face of the serious economic and social crisis that is plaguing the country.

According to state media, the count is still underway in the early morning.

The participation figures and the final results are expected before noon (07:30 GMT).

Official data could give the lie to the rare polls available which gave a record abstention of around 60% before the election.

Voting operations were extended considerably to allow maximum participation under good conditions given the Covid-19 pandemic which officially killed nearly 83,000 people out of a population of 83 million.

The ballot was officially closed at 2 a.m. on the night of Friday to Saturday (9:30 p.m. GMT Friday).

According to the Fars agency, close to the ultraconservatives, participation should exceed the fateful bar of 50%.

Head of the Judicial Authority, Ebrahim Raïssi, 60, is an archival favorite, for lack of real competition after the disqualification of his main opponents.

But since 1997, the Iranian presidential election has regularly reserved surprises.

Will it be the same this year?

The announcement of a second round on June 25 would undoubtedly be a twist as everything seemed to predict a victory for Ebrahim Raïssi in one round.

The electoral campaign was bland, against a background of general fed up with the crisis, in a country rich in hydrocarbons but subject to asphyxiating American sanctions.

Boycott calls 

Presenting himself as the champion of the fight against corruption and the defender of the popular classes with purchasing power undermined by inflation, Ebrahim Raïssi is the only one of the four candidates to have really campaigned.    

"I hope he will know (spare the population) deprivation," told AFP on Friday one of his voters in Tehran, a nurse draped in a black chador.

Reelected in 2017 in the first round against Ebrahim Raïssi who then obtained 38% of the vote, President Hassan Rouhani, a moderate who will leave power in August, ends his second term at a level of unpopularity rarely reached.

In Tehran, it is not complicated to find abstainers accusing the government of having "done nothing" for the country or not seeing the point of participating in an election that is decided in advance, or even according to them "organized". to allow Ebrahim Raïssi to win.

Faced with calls for a boycott launched by the opposition in exile, and by some dissidents in Iran, Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei has stepped up calls to participate en masse in the ballot.

Without calling for abstention, the former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, populist, who had seen his candidacy invalidated in May, denounced an election organized "against the interests of the country" and announced his decision, in a personal capacity, not to participate. to "this sin".

The lifting of economic sanctions  

Faced with Ebrahim Raïssi, who has spent most of his career in the judiciary, three candidates are in the running: a little-known deputy, Amirhossein Ghazizadeh-Hachémi, a former commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Guards, General Mohsen Rézaï, and a technocrat, Abdolnasser Hemmati, ex-president of the Central Bank.

The president has limited prerogatives in Iran, where most of the power is in the hands of the Supreme Leader.

The record of Hassan Rouhani, who is due to leave power in August, is marred by the failure of his policy of openness after the United States withdrew, in 2018, from the Iranian nuclear agreement concluded with the great powers .

This withdrawal and the reinstatement of punitive American sanctions that followed plunged the country into a violent recession, notably depriving the government of its oil export revenues.

In December and January 2017-2018 and in November 2019, two waves of protests were violently repressed.

On the question of the necessary recovery of the economy, the four presidential candidates agree that the solution lies in the lifting of American sanctions, the subject of negotiations to save the Vienna agreement by reintegrating the United States. .

For the opposition in exile and human rights defenders, Mr. Raïssi is the embodiment of repression and his name associated with the mass executions of left-wing detainees in 1988, a tragedy in which he denies any participation.

He is on the blacklist of Iranian officials sanctioned by Washington for "complicity in serious human rights violations".

With AFP

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