ERBIL, Kurdistan Region — Ebrahim Raisi said Iran will enter a “new era” after he took the oath of office and was officially inaugurated as the eighth president of Iran in parliament on Thursday.
The inauguration was attended by representatives from dozens of countries, including Iraq, and a high-level delegation from the European Union. A Kurdish delegation led by Kurdistan Region President Nechirvan Barzani was also in attendance.
During the ceremony, Raisi said that a new phase was starting in the country and that “sanctions against the Iranian nation must be lifted. We will support any diplomatic plans that will realise this goal.”
"The policy of pressure and sanctions will not cause the nation of Iran to back down from following up on its legal rights," he told the attendees in Tehran.
His inauguration comes at a time of growing challenges for the country. Iran is facing economic and health crises as well as tension with the West. Raisi also faces warnings from the United States, Britain, and Israel over a recent deadly tanker attack off Oman, for which Tehran denies responsibility.
Raisi won the Iranian presidential elections in June by a huge margin, leading his nearest rival by 14.5 million votes. The election saw a historically low turnout with only 28 million ballots cast of Iran’s potential 60 million voters.
The 60-year-old ultra-conservative former chief justice is considered to be close to Khamenei, and has a dubious human rights record. He has also refused to meet with the US over the nuclear deal agreement, from which Trump withdrew Washington in 2018.
The new president is accused of sitting on a “death committee” that oversaw mass prison executions in 1988. His involvement in the massacre may come to light in a trial that will begin next week in Sweden.
Just hours ahead of Raisi's inauguration, Amnesty International announced Iranian authorities had "secretly executed a young man who was a child at the time of his arrest and had spent nearly a decade on death row."
