Iran election: moderate Rouhani leads

10:10, 15 June 2013

TEHRAN. June 15. KAZINFORM The moderate Iranian cleric Hassan Rouhani has taken a strong lead in the initial results of Iran's presidential election, even holding some chance of winning a simple majority, though a second-round runoff appears more likely.

Seven hours after polling ended, Iran's interior minister, Mostafa Mohammad-Najjar, appeared on state-run television to announce the first results.

From more than 1.8 million votes counted at 3,573 polling stations, Rouhani had 47.4% of valid ballots, gaining 834,859 votes, with Tehran's mayor, Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf, next on 320,562 votes and Saeed Jalili falling behind with 257,822.

The race appears poised for a runoff vote next week, with the reformist-backed Rouhani competing with a conservative rival, likely to be Ghalibaf or Saeed Jalili. But if the gap between Rouhani's votes and the remaining five candidates continues, an outright win in the first round is not out of the question, The Guardian reports.

The authorities had initially announced they would begin to reveal counts just after 2am local time on Saturday (10.30pm Friday BST), but the first figures did not come through until at least four hours later. This was in marked contrast to the previous vote in 2009, which many believed was rigged, when final results were announced in matter of few hours.

"It has taken them seven hours to count 800,000 votes while four years ago they counted almost 30 million votes in few hours," one Iranian living in Tehran said via online chat on Facebook. "It might be a good sign that actually this time they're really counting."

Unlike in 2009, Iranian agencies refrained for many hours from speculating on the results or publishing unofficial counts.

On Friday millions of people across the country queued to elect a successor to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

World News