Earlier this year, Iran was headed to its scheduled parliamentary elections. As has become common in recent years, the elections were severely restricted. Under the Islamic Republic, polls have never been free and fair, and a vetting body called the Guardian Council, whose members give their primary fealty to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, decides who gets to run.
However, the polls have often featured genuine competition between the regime’s three factions: reformists, centrists, and conservatives (also called hardliners). As of late, most reformists and even centrists have been denied a run.
When the list of candidates permitted to run was announced, one big gap was clear: Masoud Pezeshkian, a reformist MP since 2008 and the former First Deputy Speaker of the Majlis had been disqualified. The regime appeared to say that even an MP like Pezeshkian—who had been careful never to get to confront Khamenei directly—had no place.
However, it wasn’t just about Pezeshkian; many others were also disqualified. With the Iranian Reformist Front (IRF) boycotting the elections, it appeared that the sun was setting on this political project, which had started in 1997 with the election of Mohammad Khatami as president—hitherto the only reformist ever to hold this office.
But Pezeshkian appealed, and after an intervention by Khamenei himself, he was allowed to run. Although the majority of Iranians didn’t vote in the Majlis polls in March, Pezeshkian was able to be re-elected to his seat in the Azeri-majority city of Tabriz in northwestern Iran. Few could have guessed that not only was his political career not over but he'd be elected president of Iran in the space of a few months. But such were the course of events.
In May, the hardliner president Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash following a return from a trip to border areas with the Republic of Azerbaijan. In the hastily organised presidential elections, the Guardian Council made a slight U-turn, allowing one of the three candidates introduced by the IRF to run: Pezeshkian.
Under the wily leadership of its female president, Azar Mansoori, IRF had precisely run the MP from Tabriz because they knew he could get approved. They then enthusiastically joined the electoral fray after years in the political wilderness. Khatami endorsed Pezeshkian, as did Mehdi Karroubi, a former parliamentary speaker who has been under house detention since 2011 for his role in leading mass protests.
Despite most Iranians not voting, Pezeshkian topped the first round of the poll on June 24 and made it to the run-offs on July 7, where he quashed his fundamentalist rival, Saeed Jalili. Only 40% of Iranians had turned out for the vote in the first round. But in the run-offs, the fear of a Jalili presidency sent many more to the polls and helped secure the deal for Pezeshkian. It has been a stunning journey for this 69-year-old physician from northwestern Iran.
Mixed like Iran itself
Pezeshkian got an especially high number of voters from his fellow Turkic Azeri Iranians, concentrated in the northwest, and some have attributed this to an ‘ethnic vote.’ But Pezeshkian’s background—like many Iranians—is quite mixed, which also helped him reach out to many of his fellow citizens, regardless of their ethnicity.
He was born in 1954 in the Kurdish city of Mahabad to a Kurdish mother and an Azeri father. He attended elementary school in the city and learned Kurdish quite well. Throughout his political life, he has often campaigned for Kurdish politicians and also repeatedly spoke Kurdish on the campaign trail. In the presidential debates, he championed ethnic minority issues and particularly protested the lack of inclusion for Sunni Iranians (most Iranian Kurds are Sunnis, as are almost all Baluch Iranians in the southeast).
Pezeshkian went to an agricultural high school in the famously mixed city of Urmiah in Iran’s West Azerbaijan province for his secondary education. In 1973, for his mandatory military service, he went all the way to the other end of Iran, serving in Zabol in southeastern Iran. During the presidential debates, he attracted attention by speaking of his years there and how he could afford to buy a motorcycle with the paltry income of a conscript, something that is unimaginable in today’s Iran. In basic words, he reminded everybody of how Iran was more prosperous under the Shah before the 1979 revolution.
Deciding he wanted to be a doctor, Pezeshkian returned to high school after finishing his two years of conscription. In 1976, he made it to the medical college in the city of Tabriz, a jewel of Iran since the medieval times and now the most major Azeri-majority city in the country. The University of Tabriz remains amongst the best in the country, and many careers have been made there. Ironically, for the Islamic Republic, many voters had respect for Pezeshkian precisely because he had studied under the previous regime and could not be accused of graft or favouritism in this regard.
From zealot to soldier
Not that Pezeshkian had been anything less than zealot-like and pro-revolutionary in 1979. The downfall of the Shah and the rise to power of Ayatollah Khomeini soon led to a ‘Cultural Revolution'—a term borrowed from Mao’s China—during which Iran’s universities were purged of anyone suspected of harbouring non-Islamist tendencies while women were brutally forced to don the mandatory veiling that soon became compulsory for all Iranian women everywhere.
As many Tabriz students remember, in later years, Pezeshkian was a devout pro-Khomeini student and helped enforce these restrictions. He gave many interviews in which he admitted to his own role in those years. But not all that he did during the 1980s is remembered badly today. When Saddam Hussein’s Iraq attacked Iran in 1980, Pezeshkian went to defend his country like millions of his fellow Iranians. During the war, he served with distinction as both a doctor and a soldier. He moved back and forth between the front and the University of Tabriz, where he completed residency periods.
After the war, he started teaching in Tabriz, climbing the ladders of his profession. In 1993, he got an advanced degree in heart surgery from a top college in Tehran. His scientific achievements and his pro-regime credentials both helped him rise, and he would come to head several universities there. He has done medical residencies in the US, Switzerland, and Thailand and is fluent in English—unlike most of his predecessors (even the academic Khatami spoke terribly broken English).
The year 1994 should have been a happy one for him since he started his post as the president of the medical college in Tabriz, where he had started his academic journey decades ago. But it went on to become perhaps the most bitter year in his life: in a tragic car accident, he lost his wife, Fateme Majidi, who was also a doctor, as well as their son. He would never remarry and go on to raise his surviving three children (a daughter and two sons) as a single father.
During the recent campaign, he attracted much sympathy not just because many identified with his struggles as a single father but because his children recalled how he had always helped with the house chores when his wife was alive, departing from a patriarchal stereotype. His daughter often accompanied him during the campaign and is already seen as something of a First Daughter. Pezeshkian is now the first Iranian president to move into office without a spouse.
