TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran held a final presidential debate Saturday that showed the fissures within the Islamic Republic’s politics, as hard-liners referred to those seeking ties to the West as “infiltrators” and the race’s two other candidates brought up the unrest that surrounded Tehran’s disputed 2009 election.
Analysts and state-linked polling put hard-line judiciary chief Ebrahim Raisi as the clear front-runner in Friday’s upcoming vote, with the public now largely hostile to the relative moderate President Hassan Rouhani after the collapse of Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers.
But that didn’t stop Rouhani’s former Central Bank chief Abdolnasser Hemmati from harshly criticizing Raisi, at one point getting up from his chair to hand him a list he described as naming individuals who haven’t paid back huge loans from state banks. He again tried to link Raisi to former President Donald Trump, whose decision to unilaterally withdraw America from Iran’s nuclear deal has seen the country crushed by sanctions.