Iran announces list of six approved candidates for June 28 elections

Iran’s Guardian Council, a 12-member election supervisory body, has finalized the list of candidates for president and submitted it to the Interior Ministry, Mohsen Eslami, the spokesperson for Iran’s Election Headquarters, confirmed.

According to IRNA, the council finalized the candidate list for the 14th presidential election on Sunday.

Six candidates have been named. They are Mostafa Pourmohammadi, Massoud Pezeshkian, Amirhossein Ghazizadeh, Alireza Zakani, Saeed Jalili, and Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf.

Elections have been called for June 28 and come in the wake of president Ebrahim Raisi’s death in a helicopter crash on May 19.

Head of parliament, Qalibaf, 62, who is a former military commander, has been seen as a potential front-runner. In a speech last week, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei seemed to signal his support for Qalibaf, analysts have said.

The council also approved the candidacies of lawmaker Pezeshkian; Jalili, a former nuclear negotiator and Khamenei’s representative on the Supreme National Security Council; Tehran Mayor Zakani; Ghazizadeh, a conservative deputy to Raisi; and Pourmohammadi, a former interior and justice minister.