At 69, Masoud Pezeshkian is the oldest person to be elected president Iran. During his decades as a member of Parliament and cabinet minister, he has spent a lot of time honing his political survival skills.
As moderates in a system dominated by hardliners, they need it.
Pezeshkian was elected president last Friday, defeating conservative opponents by a comfortable margin, but hardly an endorsement. Less than half of Iranian voters are eligible even bothered to come to the polls, and just over a quarter voted for him.
Overall, expectations are low, and Pezeshkian’s ambitions seem modest.
“Pezeshkian is an ethical reformer who will try to keep his election promises — as far as laws and regulations allow,” Hassan Mohammadi, a professor of social sciences at the University of Tehran, told CBS News.
In other words, Pezeshkian has no grand vision of reshaping Iran’s authoritarian theocracy, or challenging the supremacy of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the country’s conservative Supreme Leader, even though many Iranians long for it.
What can be done, is to try to reduce some of the harsher measures of the regime, such as the rule on the mandatory head covering for women.
“Morality police, fines and other types of punishment should be put aside,” Pezeshkian said on the campaign trail in June. “I don’t think we treat (women) fairly.”
If he does not play again the new crackdown enforcing the must wear hijabmillions of Iranian women will immediately respond by going out without covering their hair – as they did after 2022. death of Mahsa Amini in police custody.
Hardliners are sure to push back, and that may be the first real test of the new president’s strength.
In fact, Pezeshikian apparently had a taste of what was coming. Two days ago, the president-elect had a friendly phone call with Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Iran, an important neighbor of Turkey, who succeeded in embracing both Islam and secular life.
A prominent Iranian academic posted on X that, after the call, the Turkish Airlines office in Tehran was closed and sealed because the Turkish female staff inside did not wear hijabs in accordance with Iranian rules.
During the campaign, Pezeshkian also announced that he would free the internet and make more websites accessible. At the moment, it is very limited in Iran. Social media sites such as TikTok, Facebook and X are officially banned, as well as access to US and European news sites, including CBS News.
Many young, tech-savvy Iranians have become adept at circumventing the ban, but it’s difficult, and when the regime slows down internet speeds at politically sensitive times, the entire system becomes unusable.
A national survey recently found Iran’s internet service to be one of the worst in the world.
Pezeshkian said he wants to make it better.
“Filtering the internet has made middlemen and those who sell anti-filter software richer,” he said. “It hurts users, and it costs them a lot of money.”
This, too, will pit Pezeshkian against conservative members of the establishment who – with reasonable reason – fear freer access to news and uncensored information could lead to more civil unrest.
Many waves of demonstrations and protests over the past decade have posed serious challenges to the government.
On foreign policy, Pezeshkian said that better relations with the West would lead to fewer sanctions, and help Iran’s prosperity. At this point, Pezeshkian will not only have to fight against hardliners who want stronger ties with Russia and China, but will also be at events abroad, especially the US presidential election this fall.
Former President Donald Trump, during his first term in the White House, took a hard line on Iran, leave unilaterally international nuclear deal that he had previously fought hard to get Tehran to agree to.
In the program and policy that has caused the most friction with the West, and which lies at the root of the sanctions – Iran’s missile program, the processing of highly enriched. uraniumsupport for Houthis in Yemenand support for Hezbollah and Hamas among the latter group war with Israel in Gaza – Pezeshkian has made it clear that he is really on the side of the regime.
In a letter to the leader of Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah, the new president of Iran wrote, referring to Israel, that “Iran always supports the resistance (Hezbollah) against the policies of the illegal Zionist regime.”
That support, Pezeshkian assured, “is rooted in the Supreme Leader’s guidelines, and will continue.”