{{Moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani has taken a commanding lead in Iran’s presidential election based on the latest results, with about 25% of the total votes counted, according to the interior ministry .}}<\/p>\n
Rouhani, a former nuclear negotiator, leads with 5,003,633 votes, 50.8 percent of counted votes. <\/p>\n
He is followed by Tehran mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf with 1,582,724, 16.1 percent of the votes.<\/p>\n
Mohsen Rezaei, a former head of the elite Revolutionary Guard, is now in third place with 1,298,597 votes racing past Saeed Jalili, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, who has 1,229,151 votes. <\/p>\n
Trailing the field were former Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati with 620,908 votes, and little-known former minister Mohammad Gharazi with 124,129 votes.<\/p>\n
Earlier, Interior Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar told state television on Saturday that his electoral staff would not “compromise accuracy for speed”. <\/p>\n
Iran’s state-owned news network Press TV said that voter turnout in the presidential election has been around 80%. That is about 40 million votes out of a possible maximum of 50 million.<\/p>\n
Polling stations stayed open for up to five hours later than planned as millions of Iranians turned out to cast their votes.<\/p>\n
An announcement of initial results by the Interior Ministry, scheduled for around 1:30am local time, was then postponed by several hours.<\/p>\n
{Aljazeera}<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
{{Moderate cleric Hassan Rouhani has taken a commanding lead in Iran’s presidential election based on the latest results, with about 25% of the total votes counted, according to the interior ministry .}} Rouhani, a former nuclear negotiator, leads with 5,003,633 votes, 50.8 percent of counted votes. He is followed by Tehran mayor Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[101],"byline":[170],"hashtag":[],"class_list":["post-8461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-internationl","byline-igihe"],"bylines":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"contributors":[{"id":170,"name":"IGIHE","slug":"igihe","description":"","image":{"id":0,"url":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/?s=96&d=mm&f=y&r=g","alt":"Default avatar","title":"Default avatar","caption":"","mime_type":"image\/jpeg","sizes":[]},"user_id":8}],"featured_image":null,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8461\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8461"},{"taxonomy":"byline","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/byline?post=8461"},{"taxonomy":"hashtag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.igihe.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/hashtag?post=8461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}