Saturday, the hard-line conservative Iranian presidential candidate Ebrahim Raisi won the first round of presidential elections in Iran, with 62 percent of the vote, according to official preliminary results.

The head of the Elections Committee, Jamal Araf, said during a press conference that Raisi obtained "more than 17.8 million" votes out of 28.6 million votes cast, noting that more than 59.3 million Iranians were invited to participate in the elections.

Raisi, 60, who has held the Chief Justic of Iran position since 2019, was the favorite to win the elections, which came in the midst of an economic and social crisis and was accompanied by questions about participation rates.

Prior to the announcement of official results, the current Iranian President Hassan Rouhani indicated his successor had been elected, without revealing the name, pending the announcement of the results from the Ministry of Interior.

He said in a televised speech, "I congratulate the people on their choice (...) my official congratulations will come later, but we know who got enough votes in this election and who is elected today by the people."

In social media posts or statements by Iranian media, the two hard-line conservative candidates Mohsen Rezai and Amir Hossein Ghazizadeh-Hashemi, as well as the reformist Abdolnasser Hemmati, congratulated Raisi for his "winning" in the elections.