Iran’s new hope: a cardiologist president
The election of Masoud Pezeshkian, a reform-minded cardiologist, as president of Iran on July 5th prompted jubilation. In the hours after the vote, men and women danced in the streets as if the country’s strict dress code were no more. Some speculated that they would now escape the grip of their ayatollahs and of American sanctions. Hossein Derakhshan, a former political prisoner now close to Mr Pezeshkian, chirped that this was “the age of freedom from the cage”.
Mr Pezeshkian’s election certainly heralds change. After four decades of five clerics and one hizbullahi (a staunch supporter of the regime), ordinary Iranians at last have a president who looks and speaks like them. He articulates the concerns of the increasingly impoverished middle class. He comes from the marginalised north-west. He ran the university hospital in Tabriz, its main city, which he represented in parliament for 16 years. He is said to detest the capital, Tehran. The furniture in the flat he keeps there is tacky and unloved.
Muhammad Khatami, a popular reformist former president, emerged from a long purdah to endorse Mr Pezeshkian. Other veterans of the government of Hassan Rouhani, a former reformist leader, have joined his team. They include Ali Tayebnia, the former finance minister who a decade ago brought inflation down to single digits for the first time since 1990. Many Iranians hope he may repeat the trick; the price of chicken and tomatoes has risen seven-fold since the last presidential election, in 2021. Another Pezeshkian ally is Javad Zarif, who as Mr Rouhani’s foreign minister was the architect of Iran’s nuclear deal with America and the West but who has in recent years been under a travel ban imposed by the regime.
History, though, would urge caution. The presidency is among the weaker of Iran’s institutions. Unelected bodies such as the state media, clerical establishment, and above all the supreme leader and his praetorian guard, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, limit its powers.
Instead, victory seems to belong to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader. The electoral stand-off between Mr Pezeshkian and Saeed Jalili, a hardliner, revived a modicum of engagement with Mr Khamenei’s system, after the humiliating boycott of the first round, when turnout was 39%, the lowest on record. It rose to 49% in the second vote. “They feel this can win back the legitimacy that had leached away from the regime,” says a Western former diplomat in Tehran.
The result has also checked the growing power of the far-right Paydari, or Stabilisation, Front—Shia zealots opposed to compromise with anyone inside or outside Iran. For most Iranians, their recent rule brought economic mismanagement and Talibanisation. For Mr Khamenei, it meant a threat to his power. The Paydaris had seized control of the presidency and parliament (Ebrahim Raisi, the president who died in a helicopter crash in May, was a stalwart). They threatened both Mr Khamenei and the prospects of his son, Mojtaba, becoming his successor. The Khameneis “feel happier with a president who’s not a cleric,” says the same diplomat.
Whether Iranians will also benefit depends on how much leeway Mr Khamenei offers Mr Pezeshkian. Voters will hold the new president to his promise to keep the morality police off the streets and to allow women to dress as they choose. They will watch re-engagement with the West.
His choice of cabinet will be an early test. Mr Pezeshkian has promised to be inclusive. His team speaks of a government of vahadat-e millei, or national unity. That may mean recruiting pragmatic conservatives to stave off the Paydaris. The sole cleric in the poll’s first round, Mustafa Pourmohammadi, is tipped to be intelligence minister. A better sign of inclusion would be ending the Islamic Republic’s taboo on female and minority representation. In its 45 years since the revolution, Iran has not had a single Sunni minister and only one who was a woman.
Mr Pezeshkian’s advisers suggest he will change that. “Know-how, expertise, meritocracy and collective participation will be the four principles for selecting cabinet ministers,” says his spokeswoman, Hamida Zarabadi. But the supreme leader and the Guardian Council, non-elected notables who vet official posts, must first approve his presidency. And then parliament must vote on his choices. The clerics are already muttering about their opposition. Mr Pezeshkian, a religious man who has sworn loyalty to the supreme leader, may buckle.
Re-engaging with the West will also prove fraught, especially if Donald Trump is re-elected. “No,” said John Kirby, a White House spokesman, on July 8th, when asked if Mr Pezeshkian’s victory would tempt America back to the negotiating table. Meanwhile, Iran’s proxies are on the rampage in the region. And Iran has crept up to the threshold of weapons-grade uranium, dramatically shortening the time it would take to produce a bomb’s worth of fissile material.
There are a number of immediate steps that Mr Pezeshkian might take to reduce tensions, should he want to, notes Eric Brewer, an American former intelligence official who is now at the Nuclear Threat Initiative, an ngo. These include increasing co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN’s watchdog, whose access to Iranian sites has been curtailed over the past year, and slowing the accumulation of uranium enriched to 60% purity, which is close to weapons-grade. Such steps would be “tactical adjustments”, notes Mr Brewer, rather than a dramatic shift. Mr Pezeshkian’s real value is that he is not associated with, nor tarnished by Mr Raisi’s failed efforts to revive the nuclear deal last summer. “He’s positioned to help shift the conversation internally,” argues Mr Brewer. “And, presumably, in a constructive direction.”
Whether he can do so will depend on his domestic room for manoeuvre and willingness to challenge orthodoxies. Mr Pezeshkian is nominally the head of the Supreme National Security Council, Iran’s top security body, but he has made it clear he will bow to the deep state’s bidding. During his campaign he vowed to uphold a law committing Iran to accelerate nuclear enrichment. And no sooner was he elected than he wrote a public letter to Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Hizbullah, the Lebanese Shia group that is Iran’s most powerful proxy, stating his unwavering support “against the illegitimate Zionist regime”. “We’ll see what this guy wants to get done,” said Mr Kirby. “But we are not expecting any changes in Iranian behaviour.”
So Mr Pezeshkian’s term may be defined by his struggle to satisfy both the regime and those who voted for him. The surgeon may be able to diagnose Iran’s ills, but he lacks the medicine to cure them. ■
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