Iran Announces Final Seven Candidates In Presidential Election

The seven final candidates for the post of president in Iran were announced by the Ministry of Interior some three weeks before the election day.

The list of seven figures deemed qualified to run for taking office at the Pasteur Street of Tehran was made public on Tuesday after a qualification process carried out by the Constitutional Council.

The presidential hopefuls include Saeed Jalili, Mohsen Rezaee, Seyed Ebrahim Raeisi, Alireza Zakani, Seyed Amir Hossein Qazizadeh Hashemi, Mohsen Mehralizadeh, and Abdolnasser Hemmati.

The Constitutional Council has been examining the qualifications of more than 590 hopefuls who registered to run for president for the past several days.

Saeed Jalili is a senior diplomat and member of the Expediency Council. He was the head of the Iranian team of negotiators engaged in nuclear talks with Western countries in the 2000s and had once attended the presidential election in 2013.

Mohsen Rezaee is the current secretary of the Expediency Council. The former commander of the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps has run for president several times.

Seyed Ebrahim Raeisi is the incumbent Judiciary chief of Iran. The cleric, who was the former chief custodian of the holy shrine of the eighth Shiite Imam in Iran’s Mashhad, lost the presidential race to Hassan Rouhani in 2017.

Alireza Zakani represented Tehran in the Parliament for several terms.

Seyed Amir Hossein Qazizadeh Hashemi is currently the first vice speaker of the Iranian Parliament. The physician has been elected to the Parliament several times.

Mohsen Mehralizadeh is a former vice president and a one-time head of the Physical Education Organization of Iran with the experience of holding many governmental posts.

The final candidate, Abdolnasser Hemmati, is the incumbent governor of the Central Bank of Iran.

The main applicants disqualified from the presidential race include First Vice President Eshaq Jahangiri, former Parliament speaker Ali Larijani, former president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and former president of IRIB Ezzatollah Zarghami.

Slated for June 18, the 13th presidential election in Iran will be held simultaneously with council and midterm parliamentary and Assembly of Experts elections.