Iran begins voting in first parliamentary election since 2022

Voting begins on Friday in Iran’s first parliamentary election since mass protests over a mandatory hijab law sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, raising questions about how many people will turn out. doubt.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 84, has cast his first vote in the election, which will also welcome new members to the country’s Assembly of Experts. The panel of clerics, who serve for eight years and are tasked with choosing a new supreme leader if Khamenei steps down or dies, has become increasingly important as Khamenei ages.

Khamenei cast his vote in front of a crowd of reporters in Tehran, his left hand shaking slightly as he took the ballot from his right hand, which has been paralyzed since a 1981 bombing. State television showed a woman nearby crying as she filmed Khamenei on her mobile phone.

Khamenei urged people to vote as soon as possible, saying turnout was being watched by friends and foes of Iran.

“Delight your friends and despair your enemies,” he said in a brief speech at the ballot box.

Preliminary election results are expected to be announced as early as Saturday. Some 15,000 candidates are vying for seats in the 290-member parliament, officially known as the Islamic Shura Council. The term is four years, with five seats reserved for Iran’s religious minorities.

By law, Parliament oversees the executive branch, votes on treaties and deals with other issues. In fact, absolute power in Iran lies in the hands of its supreme leader.

Hardliners have controlled parliament for the past two decades, where chants of “Death to America” ​​are often heard.

Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Qalabaf is a former Revolutionary Guard general who supported a violent crackdown on Iranian university students in 1999. Under his leadership, the legislature introduced a bill in 2020 that would significantly limit Tehran’s cooperation with the United Nations nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency.

In 2018, then-President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew from Iran’s nuclear deal with world powers, a move that sparked years of tensions in the Middle East and led Iran to enrich enough uranium at record-breaking purity to ” Several countries” provide enough fuel. “You can use nuclear weapons if you want to.

Most recently, parliament focused on the issue of mandatory hijab for women in Iran after the death of 22-year-old Amini in police custody in 2022, sparking nationwide protests.

The protests quickly escalated into calls for the overthrow of Iran’s religious rulers. The ensuing security crackdown left more than 500 people dead and more than 22,000 detained.

Calls for an election boycott have spread in recent weeks, including by jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi, a women’s rights activist who called the campaigns ” scam”.

The boycott calls put the government under new pressure – the legitimacy of Iran’s theocracy has depended in part on turnout in elections since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

State-owned polling center ISPA did not release election data ahead of the vote until Thursday, which is highly unusual as their data is usually released earlier. The poll, based on a survey of 5,121 people of voting age, predicted a turnout of 23.5% in the capital Tehran and a national turnout of 38.5%. It said the poll had a margin of error of 2%.