Iran's moderate President Rouhani easily won re-election

A campaign poster of Iranian President Hassan Rouhani

(Image credit: BEHROUZ MEHRI/Getty Images)

last updated 20 May 2017

Iran's incumbent President Hassan Rouhani easily won re-election Friday, taking 57 percent of the vote in official tallies released Saturday. A moderate who negotiated the nuclear deal Iran made with the U.S. during the Obama administration, Rouhani was challenged by Ebrahim Raisi, a hardliner who was believed to be favored by Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and who would have scrapped the nuclear agreement.

Rouhani's campaign emphasized "social and political freedom" and engagement with the world. "I am proud of [Rouhani] because he showed all of the world we are a good country," a voter in Tehran told CNN. "Our goal is peace for our world. And I am proud of my president."

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Explore More

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.