Iran opens presidential vote with ultraconservative tipped to win

Iran's supreme leader opened a presidential election on June 17 in which ultraconservative cleric Ebrahim Raisi is seen as all but certain to coast to victory over his vetted rivals.

After a lacklustre campaign, turnout is expected to plummet to a new low in a country exhausted by a punishing regime of US economic sanctions that dashed hopes for a brighter future.

The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, cast the first ballot in Tehran and then urged Iran's nearly 60 million eligible voters to follow suit before polls are set to close at midnight (1930 GMT).

"The sooner you perform this task and duty, the better," the 81-year-old Khamenei said. "Everything that the Iranian people do today until tonight, by going to the polls and voting, serves to build their future."

But enthusiasm has been dampened by the disqualification of many candidates and the deep economic malaise which has sparked spiralling inflation and job losses, the crisis deepened by the Covid pandemic.

"I'm not a politician, I don't know anything about politics," a Tehran car mechanic who gave his name as Nasrollah told AFP. "I have no money. All families are now facing economic problems.

"How can we vote for these people who did this to us? It's not right."

Election placards are relatively sparse in Tehran, dominated by those showing the austere face of frontrunner Raisi, the 60-year-old chief of the judiciary, in his trademark black turban and clerical robe.
Raisi has been named in Iranian media as a possible successor to Khamenei.

For the exiled Iranian opposition and rights groups, Raisi's name is indelibly associated with the mass executions of leftists in 1988, when he was deputy prosecutor of Tehran's Revolutionary Court,...

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