Tehran:Iran’s ultraconservatives Sunday hailed the election victory of their candidate Ebrahim Raisi, after Washington charged the vote was unfair and Tehran’s arch-foe Israel labelled him the “most extremist” president yet.
Raisi, 60, won Friday’s election in which more than half the voters stayed away after many political heavyweights had been barred from running and as an economic crisis driven by US sanctions has battered the country.
An austere figure from the Shiite Muslim clerical establishment, Raisi takes over from the moderate incumbent Hassan Rouhani, who must leave office in August after eight years in power.
Raisi, whose black turban signifies direct descent from Islam’s Prophet Mohammed, is seen as close to the 81-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who holds ultimate political power in Iran.
“The Dawn of a New Era,” read the jubilant front-page headline of the conservative Resalat daily, welcoming the 62 percent win by Raisi, the head of Iran’s judiciary.
Raisi was congratulated by Russia, Turkey and several Gulf states, and by Iran’s regional allies including Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Lebanon’s Hezbollah and Hamas in the Gaza Strip.
Raisi’s victory had been widely anticipated after the Guardian Council, made up of 12 clerics and jurists, had approved just seven candidates, all men, out of a field of almost 600 hopefuls. Three of those vetted candidates dropped out two days before the vote.
Iran’s moderate Jomhouri-e Eslami daily highlighted that conservatives had now cemented their hold on power, from parliament and the Guardian Council to the court system and armed forces.
Using a touch of irony, its editorial said that “we, the people of Iran, owed the conservative faction a homogeneous government” and “the people have delivered”.

– ‘Epic’ turnout –

Turnout reached 48.8 percent, a record low for a presidential poll since Iran’s 1979 revolution ousted the US-backed monarchy.
The ultraconservative Kayhan daily argued that voter participation was “epic” considering the economic crisis, Covid pandemic and the “enemy’s propaganda”, referring to boycott calls from Iranian opposition groups abroad.
The Resalat daily welcomed the change from the Rouhani administration which it said has been dogged by political infighting and occupied with “fruitless domestic and foreign challenges”.