Iran to Hold Runoff Election

You know, two things stood out to me. The 1st is that the voter turn out was so low at these Iranian presidential debates, even though of course the supreme leader was hoping for more people to to come out to the polls and numbers that didn't occur. And the second thing of course is that the reformers did make it through to the second round. So what do we know about these two candidates? You're 100%. These two significant things emerged from the elections on Friday over the weekend. So the reformist candidate who is also a heart surgeon won 42% of the vote votes, but that was short of the 50% required for him to win. Jalili, the hardliner who was close to Khamenei, received 38.6. So and this was of course a very low turn out for Iran. The turn out was about 40%. And this is 24,000,000 out of the 60 million registered voters. So this shows maybe nationwide discontent and perhaps how the country is being managed, right? So earlier this year, we also saw a low record turn out in the legislative elections, and that was the lowest since 1979. And this is very significant for Iran. That's always prided itself with how it runs the elections and how many people actually vote and cast their ballots. And this is despite Khamenei's calls on Friday when he cast his ballots for everyone to rally and go to the polls. And now we see that these two candidates are set to compete in the next round on July 5. Doubt we're going to have a higher turn out, but it's going to be interesting to see who will definitely win these elections. Yeah. I mean, also, it's interesting to see that the other what we didn't talk about is before there were six candidates, then two pulled out before round one, but all of them were hardliners. And you would think that they're all going to mobilize together in support of Jalili, who is the other more conservative candidate as well. But what does it mean for for policy at the end of the day? I mean, we've spoken about this before. Aren't most of the decisions still at the hands of the supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei? What influence is this new president actually going to have? In reality, you're 100%. Whoever wins, it's clear that the ultimate decision, the power, rests within the Supreme Leader, and he has the final say over foreign policy, military, and of course local local policy. What is interesting is that the reformist might actually want to have or opened the doors for Western powers again, maybe to have a more direct discussions again over the sanctions. Because what he was saying and what he believes is that the only way Iran can fix its broken economy is to have these talks with the West about the sanctions and reintegrate itself into the global financial system. So this could be the difference here. The hardliner would probably just do whatever Ricey did, but the reformist might push a little bit to open doors and and discuss these sanctions with with the West. And this comes at a very critical time, right? We're seeing the Gaza war that actually gave Iran a lot of prominence on the table. So this will also be interesting to see how the reformists would handle these discussions with the West as well.