Iranian voters will go to the polls tomorrow to choose a new president to succeed President Hassan Rouhani, who is ending his second and final term, according to the constitution.

This comes as the country crosses a critical crossroads that defines the internal and external political features of the next president, amid expectations that the percentage of participants be low in these elections, which is the thirteenth since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran in 1979, and a strong presence of conservative candidates at the expense of the reformist movement's candidates.

Today, in Iran, the stage of electoral silence has begun, after the end of campaigning for the presidential elections.

The Iranians will choose one of four candidates: Ebrahim Raisi (60 years), the current head of the judiciary in Iran, and he is running for the election for the second time. In 2017, he was the strongest competitor to the outgoing President Hassan Rouhani, and Amir Hossein Qazizadeh Hashemi (50 years), a conservative politician who is currently the first deputy speaker of the Iranian parliament, and Mohsen Rezaei (67 years), who is the Secretary-General of the Expediency Council, is described as a (permanent candidate in the presidential elections) and was the commander of the Revolutionary Guards for 17 years.

The latter two may announce their withdrawal before the polling stations open tomorrow morning in favor of Raisi.

As for the fourth candidate, Abdel Nasser Hemmati (64 years) the governor of the Central Bank of Iran until his candidacy was announced. He is an economist, and is running the election race for the first time as an independent, despite his strong relations with both the reformist and conservative camps.

In early June, the Guardian Council approved a list of seven final candidates out of 592 candidates, including 40 women, who registered for the elections.

The number of voters in Iran is 59,310,307, and local opinion polls conducted in the last period expected that the turnout would be in the range of 40 percent, noting that the last polling process in the Islamic Republic, the 2020 legislative elections, witnessed a rate of 43 percent. 

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