The victory of Hassan Rouhani has stunned pundits, and it seems even Iranians can’t quite believe it. He is a moderate (if not, quite, a reformer) who defeated five conservatives. He was helped by the fact that other moderates had stood back to give him a clear run. His victory was massive – 51pc of the vote – and the Iranian authorities seem to have made no attempt to conceal it. There was no need for a second vote. The supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has congratulated the 64-year-old Glasgow-educated Rouhani:-
“I urge everyone to help the president-elect and his colleagues in the government, as he is the president of the whole nation.”
The quotes coming through from Iranian votes show a mixture of surprise and jubilation. Here is a selection.
“I thought they would trick us, engineer a runoff with another candidate and make Rowhani lose,” Reyhan, 30, a poet, quoted by the New York Times
“…a clear sign that after the 2009 uprising, the supreme leader has learned that his regime needs to regain its legitimacy, and that will only come from counting the vote of the people” – Meir Javedanfar, an Iranian politics lecturer at Interdisciplinary Centre in Herzliya, Israel.
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