Does the new Iranian president have a chance to change his country?
In his commentary, the former Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Affairs Minister of the Czech Republic, and former President of the UN General Assembly, Jan Kavan, assesses the policy of the new Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, who represents a reformist current.
The pragmatic Pezeshkian is aware that he has gained some, though certainly limited, room for change, but the question is whether he will accept this when he hits its limits.
In Iran, a US helicopter crashed in the mountains on 19 May 2024, killing seven top officials on board, including conservative President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian. Supreme Leader and de facto Head of State Ayatollah Ali Khamenei called new presidential elections. However, no one expected any changes. The (Revolutionary) Guardian Council received applications from 80 candidates, of whom 74 were vetoed and of the remaining six, two later resigned. Of the four who went into the electoral fray, including three were well-known conservatives led by former nuclear negotiator Saeed Jalili who rejects any friendly gestures towards the West and advocates a Taliban form of government. Jalili eventually came second in the election and surprisingly the only reformist to win was 69-year-old cardiac surgeon Masoud Pezeshkian, a former health minister in the government of reformist President Mohammad Khatami from 2001 to 2005.
In the second round, in which on 2 July 2024 the number of voters rose sharply from less than 40% in the first round to 49.7% (out of 61 million voters), Pezeshkian received 2.7 million more votes than Jalili and won with 53.7%. Clearly, at least some voters thought they could vote for some change.
Pezeshkian is not well known in the world. In the Czech media, readers have learned nothing about him at all, except for a few sentences that elections have been held in repressive Iran, which will not change anything at all.
It is, of course, possible that there will be no significant change, but it would be absurd and irresponsible not to be interested in a politician who is going to try to bring about that change.
Pezeshkian was born in the city of Mahabad in the western province of Azerbaijan, Iran. His father is of Azeri ethnicity and his mother is Kurdish. He speaks Azeri, Persian, Kurdish, Arabic, Turkish and English. He graduated from Harvard University Medical School, where his initially anti-American stance from his student days in Tehran during the revolutionary protests against the rule of Shah Pahlavi was considerably softened. While he was head of the medical university in Tabriz, Iran, he pushed for the establishment of 600 clinics in the agricultural counties of East Azerbaijan Province, for which he earned recognition from the World Health Organization (WHO). He still operates on his patients once a week.
Pezeshkian tried twice to run for president, in 2013 and 2021, but was disqualified by the Guardian Council, made up of clerics and government lawyers. Indeed, by then he was already known as an activist who advocated primarily for the civil rights of Iranian women. In this, he had the full support of his wife Fatemeh Majidi, whom he had met in medical school, where she studied gynecology. Sadly, she was killed in a car accident in the 1990s along with one of their children.
Pezeshkian was deeply affected by her death, and later admitted that “it was extremely difficult for me to go on with my life”. Pezeshkian also confessed his love for Fatemeh during the election campaign. Among Iranian politicians, such a confession is extremely unconventional, and tears in front of the camera at the memory of one’s partner are even rarer. Pezeshkian then raised their three other children alone and never remarried. Ali Vaez, the Iranian director of the International Crisis Group, commented, “He vowed that just as he remained faithful to his family in the absence of their mother, he would remain faithful to the Iranian people.”
He said he wants to lead Iran to greater prosperity, social justice and more dialogue with the West.
In his article in the Teheran Times (writing in English), he wrote that in foreign policy he wants to strengthen relations with allies such as Russia (“a valued strategic ally”) and China, and “improve relations with all neighbours and also with the global South”, but at the same time he is open to cooperation with the European Union, adding that Iran “will not respond to pressure from the US”. However, he also said improving relations with Europe depends on “Europe’s ability not to project its internal disputes into foreign policy and to agree on common friendliness towards Tehran”. The new president agreed with some of his predecessor’s steps. For example, he wants to actively participate in the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) and work within the BRICS.
His key supporter is Javad Zarif, now a university professor but who was foreign minister in the government of the moderately reformist former president Hassan Rouhani. This Harvard graduate was the chief architect of the nuclear deal (JCPOA) with the US. His US counterpart and important friend was John Kerry, Obama’s Secretary of State from 2013 to 2017. These two politicians pushed for friendly relations between the two countries in 2015, the first time since the 1979 revolution. Under the JCPOA, Iran has pledged not to enrich uranium and to use its nuclear energy only for peaceful purposes. The lifting of sanctions by President Obama has led to an increase in the standard of living for many Iranians. Unfortunately, shortly after coming to power in 2018, Donald Trump revoked the JCPOA and imposed huge sanctions on Iran, particularly on the oil industry and the financial sector, as part of the so-called ‘maximum pressure’.
After the cancellation of the JCPOA and the US violation of the treaty, Iran had no reason not to enrich its uranium anymore.
At the time the JCPOA was signed, according to US experts, Iran was more than a year away from the so-called breakout date when it would be able to produce a nuclear weapon. Now – according to US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken – it is just weeks away from that date. Trump has therefore achieved exactly the opposite of what the US wanted – that is, to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.
This new situation makes it very difficult for Pezeshkian to realise one of his proclaimed goals, i.e. the renewal of the JCPOA, not to mention the likelihood that Donald Trump may be re-elected US president in November 2024. In that case, Pezeshkian would fail to prevent Iran from becoming nuclear-armed. His hope could be the election of Kamala Harris as the Democratic President of the US, as the current US Vice President has made it clear that the renewal of the JCPOA has some sympathy for her.
Among his promised changes, Pezeshkian included the abolition of the mandatory hijab for women, allowing access to the internet and negotiations with the US on ending the current sanctions.
He is to be assisted in this by Mohammad Javad Zarif, who now chairs the government’s Council of Advisers. He is also expected to appoint Seyed Abbas Araqchi, who was Zarif’s deputy, as his foreign minister.
Pezeshkian acknowledged that it will not be easy for him to push through his reforms because in Iran the president has only limited powers and the Supreme Leader Khamenei, with whom Pezeshkian does not want to go into open confrontation, has the final say. Ali-Akbar Mousavi Khoeni, a former reformist lawmaker who now lives in the US, noted that Pezeshkian has always preferred negotiation to confrontation, but predicted that “contradictions will arise the moment he tries to implement his ideals”. In the meantime, Pezeshkian will try to push through certain reforms within the existing order. Ayatollah Khamenei, who earlier vetoed him, supports him for the time being because, as Iranian analyst Abbas Abdi has written, “the system has reached a dead end and has understood that it is necessary to adjust its course to prevent its collapse”. And in an interview from Tehran, he added that ‘Pezeshkian is the man to have at the helm, and so there is some hope that Iran will open up’.
The pragmatic Pezeshkian is aware that he has gained some, though certainly limited, room for change, but the question is whether he will accept this when he hits its limits. He already has some experience of this when he criticised the corruption of clerical circles. His approach from his time as Health Minister is illustrative. He dealt with the death in prison of the Iranian-Canadian journalist Zahra Kazemi in 2003 and at the time, after an autopsy he conducted, concluded that she was killed by a blow to the head, contradicting the prosecutor’s claim that she died of a heart attack. However, he did not venture further and did not respond to the murder victim’s family’s claim that she was said to have had other significant injuries on her body.
He will also face a majority in the Iranian parliament, which is dominated by supporters of his rival Saeed Jalili.
Ali Shariati, a member of Iran’s Chamber of Commerce, commented that “one of the biggest problems that Pezeshkian will face will be the efforts of the Jalili-led shadow government to completely thwart his work,” adding that “corruption, and especially the economic benefits that come from sanctions for the corruption networks, will motivate them to prevent any diplomatic successes and prevent the lifting of US sanctions.”
In a recent speech, Pezeshkian said that
“I have come to seek lasting peace and cooperation in the region, as well as dialogue and constructive interaction with the world.”
He is aware that tensions prevail in relations with the West, also due to Iran’s supply of drones to Russia for its war with Ukraine. After his election as president, Pezeshkian telephoned Russian President Putin to reassure him of Tehran’s continued support for Moscow.
There is cautious optimism in Tehran about Pezeshkian, but most people are convinced that there will be no significant changes before the US elections this November. This does not rule out the possibility that the two sides could try to resume negotiations to de-escalate tensions on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly plenary this late September. At that time, the so-called Summit on the Future will be underway at the UN, which will address various efforts to de-escalate tensions, to reach ceasefires in ongoing armed conflicts, to reach agreement on climate change, and will also focus on the issue of AI (artificial intelligence) and its potential misuse.
Update by the author Jan Kavan: Since I wrote the above article the only Iranian politician I personally trust, my friend Mohamad Javad Zarif, former Foreign Minister, had resigned as the Chairman of the committee entrusted to select 19 members of the new government. In his resignation letter he apologised for his failure to fulfill his promise to select representatives of the reformists, women, youth and ethnic groups. On the contrary, Supreme Leader Ali Khameini instaled a number of hardliners in most important positions. My cautious optimism thus received a major, though not fatal, blow. The struggle has to continue.
Cover photo: Pezeshkian as Iranian MP, 2019. Source.
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