Iran’s president-elect Ebrahim Raisi has welcomed the negotiations with world powers aimed at reviving a 2015 nuclear deal however he has warned that they must guarantee national interests.
The President-elect who granted his first news conference since his victory in Friday’s election promised he would not allow the talks in Vienna to be dragged out.
He also insisted that Iran’s ballistic missile programme was ‘not negotiable’.
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The nuclear deal has been close to collapse since the US abandoned it and reinstated sanctions three years ago.
Mr. Raisi, a hard-line Shia Muslim cleric who is head of Iran’s judiciary and is close to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, won Friday’s election by a landslide, with 62% of the vote in the first round.
However, turnout was just under 49% – a record low for a presidential poll in the country since the 1979 Islamic Revolution – following calls for a boycott from dissidents and some reformists in response to the disqualification of several prominent candidates who might have provided serious competition.
On Monday, Mr. Raisi described Iranians’ participation in the election as a message of ‘unity and cohesion’, and a sign that they continued to ‘walk the path’ of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
According to him, voters had given him a mandate to ‘fight against corruption, poverty, and discrimination’, which he had accused the moderate President Hassan Rouhani of failing to tackle during the campaign.
Mr. Raisi said his approach to foreign policy would not be limited by the nuclear deal negotiated by Mr Rouhani, which saw Iran agree to limit its nuclear programme in return for sanctions relief.
AFRICA DAILY NEWS, NEW YORK
