"I hope that the day will come that Saudi Arabia will adopt this path," he said. Unlike Saudi Arabia, which occasionally holds elections for municipal councils, Iran regularly holds elections for president, parliament and other posts. That's when Saudi Arabia executed a prominent Shiite cleric and protesters in Iran attacked two of the kingdom's diplomatic posts. Saudi Arabia immediately cut diplomatic ties and other Sunni Arab countries in the Gulf have taken a harder line on Iran since. At the Tehran press conference, Rouhani also defended Iran's ballistic missile program, something heavily criticized by Trump's new administration.

Source: ABC News May 22, 2017 13:29 UTC