Masoud Pezeshkian
Masoud Pezeshkian has been President of Iran since July 2024, elected in a snap contest after Ebrahim Raisi died in a helicopter crash. Born in Mahabad in 1954 to an Azeri father and a Kurdish mother, he is a heart surgeon by profession and headed the Tabriz University of Medical Sciences. He served as health minister under the reformist president Mohammad Khatami from 2001 to 2005, and was elected to parliament for Tabriz in 2008, serving five terms and rising to first deputy speaker. He was disqualified from the 2021 presidential race by the Guardian Council, which vets all candidates, and permitted to run in 2024 as the only reformist against several conservatives. He won the runoff with about fifty-four per cent on a turnout of under fifty per cent — the lowest in the Islamic Republic's history in the first round, which he acknowledged as a measure of public disengagement. His platform was to seek the lifting of sanctions through renewed nuclear negotiations, to loosen internet restrictions, and to end enforcement of the compulsory hijab by the morality police, an issue inflamed by the death in custody of Mahsa Amini in 2022. The presidency in Iran is subordinate to the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, who controls the armed forces, the judiciary and foreign policy, so the office's capacity to deliver such changes is structurally limited. His term has been dominated by external conflict: direct exchanges of fire with Israel in 2024, the collapse of Bashar al-Assad's government in Syria that December, and strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities in 2025. Economic conditions have worsened, with the rial at record lows and energy shortages closing schools and offices. He lost his wife and one of his children in a car accident in 1994 and raised the surviving children alone, never remarrying.
- Lived: 1954 CE – ?
- Nationality: Iranian
- Roles: President of Iran (2024-present)
