Iran's 2024 Parliamentary and Presidential Elections: An Analysis

This article critically analyzes the results of the twelfth Majles elections held concurrently with the sixth Assembly of Experts elections in March 2024, and the Presidential election held in June/July 2024. It is maintained that the Majles election was engineered to lead to the consolidation of power by conservative forces at the expense of popular legitimacy. Still, a plethora of intriguing developments worthy of scrutiny were unveiled. These included (a) the largest number of registered Majles candidates (including the largest number of female candidates), (b) the most favorable candidates-to-seats ratio to date, (c) a record number of candidates forced to run in runoff elections. In the Presidential contest vote splitting by five conservative candidates enabled the sole moderate reformist candidate to emerge victorious, albeit with the narrowest margin of victory ever. Both the Majles and presidential elections also marked the lowest level of voter turnouts for these bodies over the last four decades.