Masoud Pezeshkian Promises Change in Iran. Can He Deliver?
Iran’s president-elect, Masoud Pezeshkian, walked through a leafy cemetery, glanced at tombstones and sat by the one bearing his wife’s name. Moments later he was riding in a car, weeping.
The scenes were captured in a campaign video addressed to his wife, Fatemeh. “I miss you more than ever,” the narrator says, speaking on behalf of Mr. Pezeshkian, “I wish you were here with me in these days when I have made this difficult pledge.”
Public declaration of love is an anomaly among Iranian politicians. Crying on camera for a romantic partner is even rarer.
But Mr. Pezeshkian, a 69-year-old cardiac surgeon who won the election in an upset as a reformist, looks and sounds unconventional.
He has portrayed himself as a modern leader for a new era in Iran, a religious man who considered his wife an equal partner when she was alive — and like him, practicing medicine — and who was a devoted widower after her death in a car accident. He raised three children and never remarried.
“It’s very interesting how he has used his family story as a sign of his commitment and reliability,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran director of the International Crisis Group. “He promised that in the same way that he stood by his family in the absence of their mother, he would stand by the Iranian people.”
Mr. Pezeshkian has said that he wants to steer Iran toward becoming more prosperous, more open socially and more engaged with the West. In an opinion column published in The Tehran Times on Saturday, he described his foreign policy as “opportunity driven,” strengthening ties with allies Russia and China, but also open to cooperating with the European Union. He said Iran would not “respond to pressure” by the United States.
Whether Mr. Pezeshkian can deliver on these changes remains to be seen. Predecessors tried and failed. But he has an opportunity, albeit limited, because Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the top authority on all major state issues, has endorsed him and instructed subordinates to work with the new president.
On Friday night, at a religious ceremony at Mr. Khamenei’s compound, the supreme leader walked into the hall together with Mr. Pezeshkian, a gesture he had not made for any president for at least three decades, observers said.
“He may have some room for maneuver but also faces a lot of structural obstacles,” Mr. Vaez said.
Mr. Pezeshkian has sought to come across not as a disrupter but as a more pragmatic fixer, saying in debates he would obey Mr. Khamenei and pursue the supreme leader’s overall policies.
Analysts said he will have to bargain with Mr. Khamenei, and even push back, if he is to deliver on the changes he promised, like curbing enforcement of mandatory hijab wearing for women, lifting restrictions on the internet and engaging with the United States in a bid to lift sanctions.
Just a few months ago, the prospect of a change from a conservative to a reformist government in Iran seemed fantastical. Then in May, Ebrahim Raisi, the conservative cleric who was president, died in a helicopter crash.
He is Iran’s most credentialed president, a physician, a professor, a former health minister, and a lawmaker who has presided over a major medical university and research center. He speaks Persian, Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic and English — and trained in health leadership at Harvard University, which friends said in interviews had softened his view of the United States.
While Mr. Pezeshkian is not a member of any political party, his ascent has ridden the coattails of the reformist party. Mohammad Javad Zarif, a former foreign minister and prominent figure in the party who campaigned for him, leads the transition government’s advisory committee.
Since the election, Mr. Pezeshkian has only spoken to Iranian media, and his office says a New York Times request to interview him is pending.
Colleagues and friends described him as outspoken, honest, and motivated by social justice. They said he has always been loyal to the Islamic Republic’s theocracy even though he has criticized its corruption and policies that have weakened Iran’s living standards.
“He didn’t compromise on his beliefs, but he knew how to navigate when tensions came up,” said Dr. Kianoush Jahanpour, a former deputy health minister, in a telephone interview from Tehran.
Mr. Pezeshkian was born in Mahabad, in northwest Iran, to an ethnic Azeri father and a Kurdish mother. He entered medical school in Tabriz, capital of Iran’s East Azerbaijan Province, as revolutionary fervor was spreading against the Shah in 1977, two years before the Islamic revolution.
In medical school he fell in love with Fatemeh Majidi, a fellow classmate described by a mutual friend as a tall, dark-eyed beauty who was one of the few women wearing the hijab. They wed, bypassing the arranged marriages common to their generation.
“Theirs was a modern marriage of equals. They did everything together. They studied, they marched in protests during the revolution, they took care for their four children, taking turns when each had night shifts at the hospital,” said Dr. Noraladin Pirmoazzen, a friend and classmate who was also a lawmaker, in a telephone interview. He and Mr. Pezeshkian volunteered together as trauma surgeons during the Iran-Iraq war.
Mr. Pezeshkian completed his residency in heart surgery and his wife in gynecology. In 1994, on a trip, their car flipped in a crash, killing her and their youngest child, a baby boy. Mr. Pezeshkian has told Iranian media that “it was very difficult for me to continue living.”
He never opened a private practice and remained at public hospitals and government university medical centers. He still operates on patients once a week, and as part of his populist persona, he wears sports jackets instead of suits. His daughter Zahra, a chemist who campaigned alongside him, told state television that while growing up the family lived in modest university housing.
In Tabriz, while head of the medical university there, he led an effort to build 600 clinics in rural areas of East Azerbaijan, winning recognition from the World Health Organization. He was appointed deputy health minister and later health minister during the reformist administration of President Mohammad Khatami.
Ali-Akbar Mousavi Khoeini, a reformist former lawmaker during Mr. Pezeshkian’s tenure as health minister, who now lives in exile in the United States, said that he was known for preferring mediation over confrontation. But Mr. Khoeini predicted that as president, “the clashes will start when he tries to implement his ideas.”
Some government critics say Mr. Pezeshkian is not a reformist because in their view the system is essentially unreformable and that his presidency should be viewed as the status quo.
“I don’t have much hope. The reformists, even at the peak of their power, were not able to implement any long lasting and deep changes regarding women’s rights, let alone now in this climate of oppression,” said Aliyeh Motallebzadeh, a women’s rights activist who has been jailed, in an interview from Tehran. “Pezeshkian is a man of the system.”
Activists say that he has toed the government line on several occasions, requiring women to wear the hijab in the early years of the revolution while president of a university.
There is also the question of how he dealt with death in prison of the Iranian-Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi in 2003. As health minister, Mr. Pezeshkian examined Ms. Kazemi’s body and was the first official to say that she had been killed from a blow to her head, contradicting the prosecutor’s claim of a fatal heart attack. But he did not go further and say there were more extensive signs of bruises on her body as her family had asserted.
Supporters say his views on hijab have evolved. During the campaign Mr. Pezeshkian said he did not believe in telling others how to dress and that the hijab law had backfired.
He has faced his own run-ins with the system. In 2003, Parliament tried to impeach him as health minister over medical service fees and the opaque medical drugs market. Twice, the Guardian Council, a body of clerics and jurists that vets candidates, disqualified him for the presidency and Parliament. Mr. Khamenei intervened this past winter, and his candidacy was resurrected, according to Abbas Abdi, a political analyst who was part of Mr. Pezeshkian’s election advisory committee.
“The system reached a dead end and realized it needed to change course in order not to implode,” Mr. Abdi said in an interview from Tehran. “It has accepted that Mr. Pezeshkian is the man it needs at the wheel, and we have more than a little hope that Iran will open up.”
Leily Nikounazar contributed reporting.
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