Masoud Pezeshkian

Masoud Pezeshkian (born September 29, 1954, Mahabad, Iran) is the president of Iran (2024– ). He is distinguished from his predecessor in that he favors a nuclear agreement with the West and modest social and political reforms at home. He is the most reform-oriented president since Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005), under whom he served as minister of health (2001–05), although he is considered a regime loyalist and is restrained by a historically conservative Majles (parliament). As a member of the Majles (2008–24), he criticized the government for the death of Jina Mahsa Amini, the strict imposition of hijab, and law enforcement’s brutal reaction to popular protests beginning in 2009. As president he backed the government in its crackdown on the 2026 protests, which he accused of being fomented by foreign actors amid threats by the United States and Israel to intervene. After Ali Khamenei’s death at the start of the 2026 Iran war, he served in the interim body constitutionally tasked with executing the duties of supreme leader until Mojtaba Khamenei, Ali Khamenei’s son, was appointed to the position.

For more background and context behind current events involving Iran, see 2026 Iran war, 2026 Iranian Protests, and 12-Day War.

Personal life and education

Pezeshkian was born in 1954 in the city of Mahabad in northwestern Iran. The city is predominantly ethnic Kurdish, and Pezeshkian’s mother was from a Kurdish family. Mahabad is located in West Azerbaijan province, which is predominantly Azerbaijani and Kurdish in ethnicity, and Pezeshkian’s father was Azerbaijani. Pezeshkian was conscripted into the Artesh, Iran’s regular army, in the final decade of Mohammad Reza Shah’s rule, and, in the years before the Iranian Revolution (1979), he began his studies in medicine at Tabriz University of Medical Sciences. Following the revolution and the outbreak of warfare with neighboring Iraq (see Iran-Iraq War [1980–88]), Pezeshkian served in the devastating war as both a medic and a combatant.

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After the war, Pezeshkian taught at Tabriz University of Medical Sciences, where he also began specializing in surgery. Meanwhile, his family grew: he had a daughter and three sons with his wife, Fatemeh (née Majidi), a gynecologist he had met while studying in the 1970s. He earned his specialization in 1990 and then entered Iran University of Medical Sciences to obtain a subspecialty in heart surgery. In 1993 Pezeshkian and his family were involved in a car crash. He, his daughter, and his two eldest sons survived, but his wife and their youngest son did not. Pezeshkian never remarried.

The following year Pezeshkian became the chief administrator of Tabriz University of Medical Sciences. In the 2020s, amid the public furor over the sudden death of Jina Mahsa Amini (who had been in custody for “improper” attire), it came to light that Pezeshkian had played a role as the chief administrator in enforcing the hijab mandate at the university.

Political career

In 2000 Pezeshkian was appointed deputy health minister in the cabinet of Pres. Mohammad Khatami, a reformist. By then the reformist movement, which generally accepts the principles of Iran’s Islamic Republic but seeks to liberalize it, had come to blows with conservative “principlists” in the Majles, law enforcement, and the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Pezeshkian, who had no previous political experience and was not an activist, did little to rock the boat while in Khatami’s administration. According to the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), he later described himself as a “reformist principlist”: “I am a principlist, and it is for these principles that we seek reform.” After Khatami was reelected in 2001 and inaugurated for his second term as president, he appointed Pezeshkian to serve as the minister of health. Pezeshkian received a vote of confidence from the Majles, but he faced (and survived) an attempt to impeach him in 2003.

After the end of Khatami’s presidency, Pezeshkian ran in the 2008 parliamentary elections and won a seat to represent Tabriz in the Majles. After a brutal crackdown on demonstrations in 2009 that followed irregularities in that year’s presidential election, Pezeshkian delivered a powerful speech in the Majles condemning the government’s actions. He implored, “Do not kill people like a wild animal!”—paraphrasing a passage from the Nahj al-balāghah, a collection of the sayings of ʿAlī that Iran’s Shiʿah majority holds in high esteem. Pezeshkian gained a senior position in a caucus of ethnic Azerbaijani representatives in the Majles and took the initiative on legislation relating to health care. From 2016 to 2020 he served as deputy speaker.

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In 2022 the government stepped up surveillance as Iranians grew restless over austerity measures and cuts to subsidies. In September, Jina Mahsa Amini, a young ethnic Kurdish woman from northwestern Iran died while in custody for “improper” attire. The day after her death, Pezeshkian tweeted in Persian: “In the Islamic Republic it is unacceptable to arrest a girl for how she wears her hijab and then to hand her body to her family.…May God have mercy on us, our children, and the future of our land.” He voiced support for the Woman, Life, Freedom protests but chastised calls to oust the supreme leader as unproductive.

Run for president

Pezeshkian has formally registered on three separate occasions to run for president. In 2013 he withdrew his registration after Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president (1989–97), entered the race. In the 2021 presidential contest, which was notoriously restricted to favor the election of Ebrahim Raisi, the Council of Guardians rejected Pezeshkian’s candidacy. (For more on the political process of presidential elections in Iran, see Iran’s 2024 presidential election: Does the supreme leader choose the president?)

Pezeshkian registered for a third time in 2024, when an early election was called after the sudden death of Raisi in a helicopter crash. His qualification was surprising, as, earlier in the year, he was disqualified from parliamentary elections before being reinstated upon appeal to Khamenei. In recent years the Council of Guardians had also largely disqualified reformists and centrists from competing in elections, and Pezeshkian was the only candidate from either camp to qualify for the presidential election. But, at a moment when Iranians felt disillusioned by the political process, the timing was ripe for a candidate like Pezeshkian, whose vocal support of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and other reformist causes earned him some level of integrity among Iranians. He received wide-ranging endorsements from such figures as centrist Hassan Rouhani and reformist Mohammad Khatami (who earlier that year refrained from voting in parliamentary elections, saying the elections were “very far from free and competitive”). In the runoff between Pezeshkian and the ultraconservative candidate Saeed Jalili, voter turnout rose to nearly 50 percent, the highest of any election since 2017 (although still historically low in the broader history of Iranian elections).

Presidency

Despite offering a change of tone in the presidency and an eagerness to return to a nuclear agreement with the West, Pezeshkian did not oversee any monumental shift in policy when he took office. His stances on foreign policy and national security generally aligned with the status quo, while his calls for domestic reform were mitigated by an ultraconservative Majles. In his first weeks as president he sought to accommodate the conservatives’ concerns over security—particularly amid the high profile assassination of Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran just hours after Pezeshkian’s inauguration—and focus on economic reform. His cabinet nominations were notably conservative, including hard-liners in the ministries of interior and intelligence. But his selections were hardly without controversy, and in mid-August Mohammad Javad Zarif, Pezeshkian’s newly appointed vice president of strategy and the Iranian negotiator of the 2015 nuclear agreement, announced his resignation (although he ultimately returned to his post later that month). Authorities in December rolled back some of the Internet restrictions imposed during the 2022 protests, including lifting bans on WhatsApp and Google Play, but other such restrictions, such as those prohibiting access to social media platforms, were not immediately lifted.

In the first months of his presidency, Pezeshkian was faced with a tumultuous decline in Iran’s geopolitical fortune. Conflict between Israel and Hezbollah, one of Iran’s most important allies in the region, left the Lebanese militant group heavily weakened and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, dead. The need for fighters in Lebanon forced Hezbollah to retreat from Syria, where its fighters and Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) had been instrumental in propping up Bashar al-Assad in the decade-long civil war. Syrian rebels were then able to swiftly topple Assad and put in place a transitional government in December that was firmly opposed to Iranian influence in Syria on both political and religious grounds. The losses for Iran’s allies proved to be severe setbacks for the Axis of Resistance, an Iranian-backed military network in the Middle East and a vital arm for Iran’s hard power in the region. With observers in Israel and the United States calling for military strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities, the country was in a particularly precarious position. In January 2025 Pezeshkian met with Russian Pres. Vladimir Putin and signed a pact of cooperation against Western aggression. The treaty stopped short of any mutual defense guarantees.

In March 2025 U.S. Pres. Donald Trump sent a letter to Khamenei requesting negotiations for a new nuclear deal. That same month the United States unleashed a campaign of naval and air strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen, an important component of the Axis of Resistance, and Trump followed up the strikes with a social media post warning Iran to end its support for the rebels. In April Pezeshkian said that such threats undermine dialogue, but after plans for negotiations were confirmed days later he signaled his interest in U.S. investors conducting business in Iran. The negotiations nonetheless fell apart in June and Israel initiated a 12-day war that killed some of Iran’s top military commanders and damaged its air defense and missile systems, enabling U.S. strikes on Iran’s most important nuclear facilities. Israeli forces also struck a meeting of the Supreme National Security Council that Pezeshkian was attending, and he sustained minor injuries to his leg while escaping.

The failure to reopen the nuclear deal negotiations after the war allowed the economy to enter a freefall. Later that year Pezeshkian followed his predecessor’s pattern in proposing an annual budget that significantly boosted security spending but was austere in other parts of the budget related to the economy. When protests broke out on December 28, they spread rapidly throughout the country and by 2026 they had become the biggest challenge for the Islamic Republic since the Woman, Life, Freedom protests that Pezeshkian had backed. Although he acknowledged that the protesters had legitimate grievances and called for dialogue, he also pushed for unity against threats from the United States and Israel to intervene. He floated stipends of $7 a month, a meager offer that did little to placate protesters’ concerns. Later he appeared to back a brutal crackdown that began on January 9 and accused the protests of being fomented by foreign actors. Within days the protests had been suppressed by security forces, which killed thousands of Iranians at a rate much higher than in the suppression of the Woman, Life, Freedom protests.

In late February 2026 U.S. and Israeli forces bombarded Iran in what became the opening salvo of the 2026 Iran war. Khamenei was killed in the initial strikes and Pezeshkian, along with the chief justice Gholam Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i and Council of Guardians member Alireza Arafi, formed a constitutionally designated interim leadership council to carry out the duties of the supreme leader until Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, was selected as the new supreme leader on March 8. During the war Pezeshkian was critical of Iran’s strikes on neighboring countries. Although he said in early March that Iran would stop targeting its neighbors, the strikes continued, highlighting the presidency’s limited influence on the IRGC.