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DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Early, seesawing results released Saturday in Iran’s presidential election put the race between reformist Masoud Pezeshkian and hard-liner Saeed Jalili, with the lead trading between the two men while a runoff vote appeared likely.
After counting over 12 million votes, Pezeshkian had 5.3 million while Jalili held 4.8 million, Iranian state television reported.
Another candidate, hard-line speaker of the parliament Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, had some 1.6 million votes. Shiite cleric Mostafa Pourmohammadi had more than 95,000 votes.
It did not offer any turnout figures for the race yet - a crucial component of whether Iran’s electorate backs its Shiite theocracy after years of economic turmoil and mass protests.
Iranian law requires that a winner gets more than 50% of all votes cast. If that doesn’t happen, the race’s top two candidates will advance to a runoff a week later. There’s been only one runoff presidential election in Iran’s history: in 2005, when hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad bested former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
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