The reformer Pezeshkian has won Iran’s presidential election

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In Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian won the election to replace the president who was killed in a helicopter crash.

Iranian president-elect Pezeshkian, a heart surgeon and lawmaker who ran on a moderately reformist platform, was a relatively little-known candidate. But voters turned out in larger numbers than in round one, giving him more than 2.8 million votes over hard-line conservative Saeed Jalili, a former nuclear negotiator with strong anti-West views.

There have been calls for a boycott, including from imprisoned Nobel Peace Prize laureate Narges Mohammadi, though potential voters in Iran appear to have made the decision not to participate last week on their own as there’s no widely accepted opposition movement operating within or outside of the country.

Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the vote has been without oversight from internationally recognized monitors, so women and those calling for radical change have been excluded from the ballot.

The voting comes as wider tensions have gripped the Middle East over the Israel-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip. Iran launched its first ever direct attack on Israel in April over the war in Gaza, while militias in Iran and Lebanon are engaged in fighting.

Iran maintains a large enough stockpile to make several nuclear weapons should it choose to do so, while enriching its uranium at near weapons-grade levels. Its 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, reached by officials now backing Pezeshkian, collapsed in 2018 after then-President Donald Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the accord. In the time since, hard-liners have taken control of all levers of power within Iran’s government.

While the Supreme Leader of Iran has sole authority over the affairs of the country, presidents have the power to change policies for confrontation or negotiation with the West.

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The first votes of the election were cast by the leader of the Islamic Republic, as he dropped the ballot into the box.

Supporters of Pezeshkian warned Jalili that he will bring a “Taliban-style government” into Tehran, while Jalili accused him of running a campaign of fear-mongering.

The 63-year-old Raisi died in the May 19 helicopter crash that also killed the country’s foreign minister and others. He was seen as a potential successor to the supreme leader. He was involved with the mass executions that Iran carried out in 1988, as well as his role in the suppression of protests that followed the death of a young woman who was wrongly accused of violating the headscarf rule.

Pezeshkian voiced only modest proposals on the campaign trail, showing no inclination to push for significant changes to a government that leaves all important matters of state to Supreme Leader Ayatolla Ali Khamenei.

Pezeshkian will also be facing a government that is largely controlled by hard-liners at a time of unrest with the West.

A long list of hopefuls was narrowed down to only six by Iran’s Guardian Council, which is charged with vetting candidates. But two candidates dropped out before the first vote.

This is the second presidential election in the country’s history. The first took place in 2005, when hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad won against former President Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.

Pezeshkian got a majority of the votes with over 10 million, while Jalili got over 9 million. They advanced to Friday’s runoff election.