Masoud Pezeshkian, Iran’s president-elect, is regarded as a “reformer” in some Western circles. Within the strict parameters of Iranian politics, this could even be true. Compared to his staunchly conservative predecessor, Ebrahim Raisi, who was killed in a helicopter crash in May along with the Iranian foreign minister, and to his hard-line opponent, Saeed Jalili, whom he defeated by a comfortable margin in the recent presidential runoff, Pezeshkian may be something of a “liberal.”
Yet from a broader and more realistic perspective, he is just another cookie cutter politician completely subservient to supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and entirely committed to the regime’s destabilizing foreign policy in the Middle East and visceral hatred of Israel.
A 69-year-old cardiac surgeon and former minister of health who is due to take office next month, Pezeshkian is known to be critical of the mandatory hijab law for women and has vowed to disband the morality police, which enforces an antiquated regulation requiring females to cover their hair in public.
He attracted attention by criticizing the arrest of Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish Iranian woman who was murdered in 2022 while being detained for not wearing a hijab. But being a member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps and a “reformist principlist” who is unwaveringly loyal to the 1979 Islamic revolution, which ousted the pro-Western Pahlavi monarchy, he denounced the nation-wide protests following her death. “This situation only benefits the hypocrites and enemies of the Iranian people, who seek to sow turmoil and unrest and widen the gap between the people and the government,” he said.
Although his views have been and are shaped by rigid ideological considerations, he is not immune to pragmatic impulses. Unlike Jalili, who opposed Iran’s 2015 nuclear agreement with the major powers and who sought to build still stronger relations with Russia and China, Pezeshkian has cultivated an image of a president who would be flexible in his dealings with the outside world.
In the hope of lifting the crippling Western sanctions that stifle Iran’s oil-based economy, he has expressed a desire to resume the nuclear negotiations that broke down last year and thereby defuse tensions with the Western countries — the United States, France, Britain and Germany — that signed the agreement in tandem with Russia and China.
When it comes to Israel, however, Pezeshkian toes the party line religiously. In the wake of the election, he said he seeks “friendly relations with all nations except Israel.” During the election campaign, he promised to maintain Iran’s policy of unqualified hostility against Israel and strengthen Iranian ties with its Palestinian, Lebanese, Syrian, Iraqi and Yemenite proxies in the Axis of Resistance, the informal alliance dedicated to Israel’s destruction and the ouster of U.S. forces from the region.
In a letter to Hezbollah, one of its key members, Pezeshkian promised its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, that Iran would continue to support its current military campaign of aggression against Israel, which he condemned as “the illegitimate Zionist regime.”
It is obvious that Pezeshkian will be no different than any of his moderate and “reformist” predecessors, notably Mohammed Khatami and Hassan Rouhani, both of whom ultimately formulated their policies strictly in accordance with the wishes of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, and other reactionary elements in Tehran.
In Pezeshkian, Iranians have voted for a conventional politician who will not disappoint his masters.