Iran is picking a new president. Here’s what to know.

“Ebrahim Raisi was elected in an entirely uncompetitive election in 2021 when the results were preordained,” said Arash Azizi, a writer and historian who focuses on Iran. “The results are not preordained this time.”

Iran’s political system means the president has limited power. The Islamic republic’s supreme leader — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei — maintains direct or indirect control of all branches of government, as well as of the military and the media. However, the next president could have a significant impact on daily life, including religious requirements and dress restrictions — consequential in a country recently rocked by protests demanding freedom for women in the theocracy.

The outcome of the race will probably be decided by how many Iranians, largely jaded and disillusioned by their political system, decide that voting is worth it. Less than half of Iran’s voters cast a ballot in the first round.

Individuals seeking election to Iran’s presidency or parliament must receive approval from the Guardian Council, which vets candidates to ensure that they adhere to the principles of the Islamic republic. In practice, all 12 members of the council — six clerics and six jurists — are directly or indirectly appointed by Khamenei.

Eighty candidates entered the race to be president. The council approved six, all of them men. Two of those six dropped out just days before the election, part of an effort by hard-liners to coalesce around a conservative candidate in advance of the June 28 first-round vote.

Now, just Pezeshkian and Jalili remain in the race. With the other two conservative candidates out of the running, Pezeshkian’s campaign will need to draw in more voters in the runoff to have a chance at winning.

Though he served as the country’s nuclear negotiator, Jalili is a critic of international negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program. Jalili, 58, is a member of the Expediency Discernment Council, which was originally set up to resolve conflicts between parliament and the Guardian Council but serves in practice as an advisory body to Khamenei. If elected, Jalili is expected to continue the harsh crackdown on anti-government protesters and on Iranian women accused of violating the country’s mandatory hijab rules.

Pezeshkian, described by analysts as the sole reformist in the race, is a heart surgeon who has based his campaign around Iranian women, youths and ethnic minorities. He has taken the opposite nuclear platform from Jalili, instead campaigning on the goal of reopening nuclear talks with the West. Pezeshkian, 69, served as vice president of Iran’s parliament from 2016 to 2020, strongly supported the 2015 nuclear deal and challenged the official government narrative about the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman who died in police custody after being detained for allegedly not wearing her hijab.

The 74 candidates whom the Guardian Council initially disqualified include government officials and lawmakers — even a former president — as well as seven women.

“Only those who accept the fundamentals of this deeply undemocratic system of the Islamic republic have ever been allowed to run,” Azizi said.

What happened in the first round?

In the June 28 election, none of the four candidates crossed the 50 percent threshold required to win the race. Pezeshkian came out on top, with Jalili and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the speaker of parliament, apparently splitting the conservative vote between them.

Ghalibaf, who came in third, has urged his more than 3 million supporters to vote for Jalili in the runoff, which would put the hard-line conservative comfortably in the lead. Mostafa Pourmohammadi, another conservative candidate and the only cleric in the race, placed fourth. Neither Ghalibaf or Pourmohammadi received enough votes to enter the second round.

More than 1 million votes were voided, which is generally interpreted as a reflection of citizens who feel obligated to vote but do not want to support any of the candidates in the running — “people who don’t want to be counted as boycotters but still want to show dissatisfaction with the status quo,” Azizi explained.

The Islamic republic has long struggled with voter apathy and widespread disillusionment. The 2021 election was largely considered to be preordained in favor of Raisi, prompting many Iranians — especially those frustrated by the ayatollah’s conservative regime — to boycott voting altogether. Less than half of the electorate voted in that race, and the March parliamentary elections had historically low turnout, according to Michelle Grisé, a senior policy researcher at Rand.

The June 28 vote was no exception, as only around 40 percent of eligible Iranians cast ballots.

If more Iranians turn out to vote in the runoff, it could help the sole reformist candidate

The question was never whether Iran’s moderates would support Pezeshkian or not, explained fellow Rand senior policy researcher Heather Williams. It was whether they would show up at all.

The regime wants “turnout, though they would rather not get who the turnout is going to come out for,” Williams said.

To succeed, Pezeshkian will need to draw more voters to the polls.

“There surely is an Anybody But Jalili campaign this time around and Pezeshkian is banking on it, having openly compared him to North Korea, Taliban and even China’s Mao Zedong,” Azizi wrote to The Post. “The question is: will it be significant enough to secure a win for Pezeshkian?”

To increase turnout, Pezeshkian’s team is working to get an endorsement from a major religious leader of the theocracy’s Sunni Muslim minority, Azizi explained. Sunni Muslims boycotted the vote at a higher rate than other groups, but of the minority of Sunnis who did vote, most supported Pezeshkian.

The election is being held early after the sudden death of the last president

Iran was slated to hold its next presidential election in 2025, but the unexpected death of Raisi moved the election up by a year. Raisi died in a helicopter crash May 19 at age 63. According to the Islamic republic’s constitution, a special election must be held within 50 days.

Elected in 2021, Raisi was widely regarded as the victor of a rigged race, an effort by Khamenei to uphold his conservative regime. Some analysts believe Raisi was the ayatollah’s desired successor as supreme leader.

In the wake of Amini’s death in 2022, mass protests calling for the theocracy’s dissolution broke out in Iran and around the world. Raisi oversaw a security crackdown during which more than 500 people were killed, according to a tally from the nongovernmental organization Iran Human Rights. Iran later announced that it had pardoned more than 22,000 who had been arrested.

Raisi’s death came at a time of increasing instability and violence in the Middle East. The war in Gaza has sparked a surge in the constantly simmering tensions between Iran and Israel, as violence rises on Lebanon’s southern border, in the Red Sea and in Syria and Iraq, The Post reported last month. In April, Raisi oversaw the largest Iranian attack against Israel in retaliation for a deadly Israeli strike on an Iranian diplomatic compound in Syria.

Most political power in Iran is held by the supreme leader

Constitutionally, the president ranks second to the supreme leader, who holds most of the power and is “the ultimate decision-making authority” on national security and defense, according to Grisé. The ayatollah has in recent years “effectively encroached” on the president’s purview, Azizi said, and seized more power.

However, as head of government, the president holds important responsibilities over elements of daily life in Iran, including overseeing the national budget and signing legislation and treaties.

Crucially, the president of the Islamic republic influences how strict its morality police are in enforcing the theocracy’s religious codes and dress restrictions, as well as the level of freedom that Iran’s media is allowed to exert.

“Then there are also some day-to-day freedoms that maybe we don’t think about as much,” Williams said, “like who is allowed to attend sporting events or how many people are allowed to gather in public, or if women are allowed to dance publicly.”