Tehran: Iran’s Parliament Speaker, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf has announced his candidacy for the post of the country’s President in snap elections that are slated to take place later this month, according to Al Jazeera.
The elections in Iran were announced last month following the death of President Ebrahim Raisi on May 19 in a tragic helicopter crash.
Raisi, along with Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and other Iranian officials, were killed when their helicopter came down on a fog-shrouded mountainside in north-west Iran.
After the end of the five-day registration period on Monday evening, Interior Minister Ahmad Vahidi told mediapersons that a total of 80 applications have been submitted for the Presidential run, according to Al Jazeera.
However, the list of candidates would now be scanned by a body called the Guardian Council, taking the waiting time to June 11.
The Guardian Council is mainly a conservative-dominated, 12-member body of jurists who are either appointed or approved by Iran’s supreme leader, Seyyed Ali Hosseini Khamenei.
The candidates who will be approved by the council will have two whole weeks to campaign, present their manifestos, and participate in televised debates before the election.
The upcoming vote was earlier slated for 2025, however, Raisi’s demise changed the political landscape of the nation, as the President’s position became vacant overnight.
Raisi was buried at the shrine of Imam Reza (AS), the eighth Imam of Shia Muslims, in northeast Iran on May 23.
After formally registering his candidature for the Presidential run, Ghalibaf has vowed to improve the economy if elected.
“If I don’t run for election, the work that we have started in the last few years to solve the economic problem of the people … will not be completed,” he said, according to Al Jazeera.
A former commander of the Air Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which is a part of Iran’s military, Ghalibaf, 62, is an Iran-Iraq war veteran.
He was mayor of Tehran from 2005 to 2017 and before that, he was chief of the Iranian police forces as well, Al Jazeera reported.
Qalibaf was elected to the post in the first session of the 12th term of the Islamic Consultative Assembly held at the parliament building in Tehran on May 28, 2024.
Qalibaf was elected as the speaker of the parliament with 198 votes out of 287, IRNA reported. Mojtaba Zolnouri, and Manouchehr Mottaki were others who contested for the post.
Meanwhile, the Al Jazeera report added that the other candidates who have registered for the bid include former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, moderate ex-parliament speaker Ali Larijani, and ultraconservative former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili.
The candidate registration notably opened on Thursday and closed on Monday.
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