Srinagar- Masoud Pezeshkian, a reformist candidate and heart surgeon, emerged victorious in Iran’s runoff presidential election on Saturday. He secured the win by pledging to engage with the West. Pezeshkian’s opponent, hard-liner Saeed Jalili, was defeated in the electoral contest.
A vote count offered by authorities put Pezeshkian as the winner with 16.3 million votes to Jalili’s 13.5 million in Friday’s election.
Participation in the election was around 50 percent in a tight race between Pezeshkian, the sole moderate in the original field of four candidates who has pledged to open Iran to the world, and the former nuclear negotiator Jalili, who is a staunch advocate of Iran’s look east policy.
Political analysts say Pezeshkian’s triumph might see the promotion of a pragmatic foreign policy, ease tensions over now-stalled negotiations with major powers to revive a 2015 nuclear deal, and improve prospects for social liberalisation and political pluralism in Iran.
Pezeshkian was born Sept. 29, 1954, in Mahabad in northwestern Iran to an Azeri father and a Kurdish mother. He speaks Azeri and has long focused on the affairs of Iran’s vast minority ethnic groups. Like many, he served in the Iran-Iraq war, sending medical teams to the battlefront.
He became a heart surgeon and served as the head of the Tabriz University of Medical Sciences. However, personal tragedy shaped his life after a 1994 car crash killed his wife, Fatemeh Majidi, and a daughter. The doctor never remarried and raised his remaining two sons and a daughter alone.
Pezeshkian entered politics first as the country’s deputy health minister and later as the health minister under the administration of reformist President Mohammad Khatami.
In 2006, Pezeshkian was elected as a lawmaker representing Tabriz. He later served as a deputy parliament speaker and backed reformist and moderate causes, though analysts often described him more as an “independent” than allied with the voting blocs. That independent label also has been embraced by Pezeshkian in the campaign.
Yet Pezeshkian at the same time honored Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard, on one occasion wearing its uniform to parliament. He repeatedly criticized the United States and praised the Guard for shooting down an American drone in 2019, saying it “delivered a strong punch in the mouth of the Americans and proved to them that our country will not surrender.”
In 2011, Pezeshkian registered to run for president, but withdrew his candidacy. In 2021, he found himself and other prominent candidates barred from running by authorities, allowing an easy win for Raisi.
In this campaign, Pezeshkian’s advocates have sought to contrast him against the “Taliban” policies of Jalili. His campaign slogan is “For Iran,” a possible play on the popular song by the Grammy Award winning Iranian singer-songwriter Shervin Hajipour called “Baraye,” or “For” in English.
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