Writen by sadataley 8:41 PM - 0 Comments

Hassan Rouhani is Iran's next president

Newly elected president Hassan Rouhani leaves a polling station after voting in Tehran on Friday, June 14. Some 50 million Iranian voters were eligible to go to the polls to select a new president from a field of six candidates.
Rouhani takes Ahmadinejad's mantle as one of the country's most visible figures, at a time when it's dealing with painful economic sanctions tied to international concern about its nuclear program.
But he won't be Iran's most powerful man. That distinction belongs to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has been Iran's supreme leader since 1989. He's got plenty of backing, from conservative citizens to loyalist militia groups to, most notably, the Revolutionary Guard.

The other candidates were two-term Tehran Mayor Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, Saeed Jalili, Mohsen Rezaei, Ali-Akbar Velayati and Mohammad Gharazi.Velayati, Ghalibaf and Jalili, who is Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, are considered close to Khamenei and would have been unlikely to challenge his authority. Of the three, Jalili had enjoyed the most popular support going into the vote.

Results showed that Rouhani secured 18,613,329 votes -- or 50.7% of the 36,704,156 votes tallied.Second was Ghalibaf, with 6,077,292 votes, and third was Jalili, with 4,168,946 votes.
Moments after Rouhani was declared the winner, supporters started filling the area near Tehran's Haft-e-Tir Square to celebrate, waving the campaign's purple flags, a witness told CNN. Motorists honked, and pedestrians held their fingers high with the V sign.

The British Foreign Office immediately called upon Rouhani to set a new course for Iran.
"We call on him to use the opportunity to set Iran on a different course for the future: addressing international concerns about Iran's nuclear programme, taking forward a constructive relationship with the international community, and improving the political and human rights situation for the people of Iran," a British Foreign Office spokesman said.

Earlier, British Prime Minister David Cameron told CNN's Richard Quest that the international community "will have to deal with whatever the situation is."
"We have to remember this is always only an election between a restricted number of candidates, it's not democracy as we know it," he said.

"We have a very clear message to the Iranian government, which is that there is an option that gets Iran back into the international community, back into the family of nations. But it's got to be proper cooperation on this nuclear dossier, where so little progress frankly has been made. Otherwise, we will continue with the sanctions."

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