Sayyed Ibrahim Raisi president iran
Sayyed Ibrahim Raisi, then caretaker of AQR, offers Qassem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force, the highest honorary title of AQR, July 21, 2018, Mashhad, Iran
Sayyed Ibrahim Raisi's victory in the Iranian presidential elections was not a surprise, but the polls and their results are very significant and send domestic, regional and international messages.

The number of voters is powerfully expressive: Raisi won 17.926.345 million votes out of the 28 million who voted in the elections, regardless of the Corona pandemic that continues to threaten all countries and cause a reduction of the participation in elections. It is noteworthy that the second place went to the hardliner, former IRGC - Revolutionary Guards Corps commander Mohsen Rezaei, who won 3.4 million votes. The third place went to former central bank governor Abdel Nasser Hemmati, who represented the weight of the reformists, reaching only 2.4 million votes. Conservative lawmaker Amir Hossein Ghazizadeh Hashemi ended up with more than one million votes.

These numbers, if anything, indicate that the Iranian people, who went to the polls, did not favour the arrival of another reformist to power to succeed President Hassan Rouhani. On the contrary, more than 22.2 million (the total votes of Raisi, Rezai and Hashemi voters) supported the policy representing the Islamic Revolution and the line of the Wali al-Faqih Sayyed Ali Khamenei. There is no doubt that Brigadier General Qassem Soleimani is a partner in Raisi's victory. His assassination by the US in Baghdad rallied millions of Iranians behind the revolution and injected new blood in its body.

Former President Sayyed Mohammad Khatami, the reformists' Guru, declared that "Iranians must participate in the elections to prevent the imposition of one-stream rule". He intended to prevent the hardline movement behind Raisi from assuming the presidency. Consequently, he asked the Iranians to support the reformist candidate - without explicitly declaring it - represented by Hemmati.

The reformists waited until the last hours of the day of voting to understand in which direction the results of the elections were heading before pushing the public and those who did not want to participate in the vote to support Hemmati. Mohammad Javad Zarif - who was very popular before the leak of the recording in which he criticized Major General Qassem Soleimani and consequently the decision of the Wali al-Faqih in supporting the Revolutionary Guard Corps over the policies of the foreign minister- had said that he had accepted the position of Foreign minister in Hemmati's government, as stated by the head of the reformist coalition, Behzad Nabavi.