Pezeshkian’s Dilemma: Structural Constraints on Belated Reform and the Limits of Internal Transition in Iran

• Masoud Pezeshkian’s experience embodies a living manifestation of the reformist’s predicament when he is summoned after the moment has passed—not as a project of structural transformation, but as an instrument for managing deadlock and reducing the costs of systemic collapse.
• The legacy of Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri represents a latent horizon of internal transition, one that may still allow for a redistribution of power without rupturing the symbolic foundations of legitimacy or sliding into political vacuum or full-scale militarization.
• “Deferred reform,” when invoked at the height of existential crises, tragically transforms into a condition that saves neither the state nor the reformist. It becomes a form of political tragedy rather than a pathway to renewal.
• When crises accumulate and legitimacy erodes, it is the “reformist”—not reform itself—who is summoned, as a stopgap measure: not to reconstitute the social contract, but to pacify anger and buy time.
• Modern Iranian history is replete with precedents in which reformists and so-called “moderates” were mobilized at moments of decline, only to be consumed by the same dynamics they were meant to mitigate.
• Pezeshkian belongs to an ethical reformist tradition that remains relatively distant from major economic patronage networks, yet closely connected to a social base exhausted by prolonged socioeconomic deterioration.
• The nation that invented chess has lost many of its historical battles because of a single wrong move made too late.

This reading seeks to examine the current Iranian crisis as a compound structural crisis, produced by the accumulation of political, economic, social, and security distortions, and exacerbated by the retreat of Iran’s regional project and its forced inward turn. Within this framework, Masoud Pezeshkian’s experience emerges as a living embodiment of the reformist’s predicament when he is summoned after the decisive moment has passed-not as an agent of structural transformation, but as a mechanism for managing deadlock and minimizing the costs of systemic breakdown.

For deeper analytical grounding, and situated within the specificity of the Iranian experience-both at the moment of the Shah’s collapse and in the present crisis, which may constitute the most existential challenge the Islamic Republic has faced in decades-I attempt here to construct an integrated approach that brings together: a historical comparison of several conceptual models (Ehsan Naraghi, Shapour Bakhtiar, and Hassan Rouhani); a structural analysis of the presidency’s position within a legitimacy- and security-centered system in crisis; and an “ethical” reading of what I imagine to be a harsh and bitter internal struggle confronting a reformist president governing a state ruled by the logic of exception.

To complete this reading, at this critical juncture in the trajectory of the Islamic Republic of Iran, attention must also be directed to the legacy of Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, which may finally represent an internal transitional horizon-one that could allow for a redistribution of power without rupturing the symbolic foundations of legitimacy or descending into political vacuum or full-scale militarization. It is equally important to recognize that “deferred reform,” when invoked at the height of existential crises, tragically transforms into a condition that saves neither the state nor the reformist-a fate that invites both reflection and sorrow.

I wish to emphasize here that this reading, grounded in an interpretive analytical methodology combining historical comparison, structural analysis, and contextual reading, does not seek-by deliberate choice-to offer political predictions or policy prescriptions. Rather, its aim is to interpret and deconstruct the structural impasse confronting reform in the Iranian context, and to explore the transitional possibilities latent within the system’s own internal intellectual and political heritage.

Stable authoritarian systems tend to preserve their existing equilibria and to treat reform as a risk. When crises accumulate and legitimacy erodes, however, it is the “reformist”-not reform itself-who is summoned: a forced choice, not to re-found the social contract, but to pacify anger and buy time. At that moment, the central question is no longer one of the reformist’s sincerity or competence, but of timing: has he arrived at a moment of possibility, or after political time itself has been exhausted?

In this sense, the experience of Iran’s current president, Masoud Pezeshkian, can be read-perhaps in one of its most difficult dimensions-as the predicament of a respectable man who found himself at a bitter historical moment, caught in a profound internal struggle between his program and the coercive constraints of his official position. Pezeshkian is not alone in this predicament. The irony is that modern Iranian history is replete with cases in which reformists and “moderates” were summoned at moments of decline. I will therefore proceed to examine several contemporary examples that may help illuminate Pezeshkian’s predicament.

First: Ehsan Naraghi – the Interpreter-Reformer Who Was Consumed

Ehsan Naraghi was not a partisan politician, but a sociologist whose intellectual formation took place within the spaces of international development. He understood the crisis of the modern state not merely as a security dilemma, but as a crisis of comprehension and disconnection between authority and society. By ill fortune, he was summoned in the final years of the Shah’s rule-partly due to familial ties linking him to the Shah’s wife, Empress Farah Diba-at a moment when the security-centered approach had already failed. His role was thus reduced to one of explanation and narrative construction, stripped of executive instruments and devoid of political protection.

Naraghi held significant and substantive dialogues with the Shah in the last days of the monarchy, leaving behind a historical testimony for those willing to read it in his important book From the Shah’s Court to the Prisons of the Revolution. This quiet, reform-minded intellectual found himself, after the victory of the revolution, condemned and imprisoned in the notorious Evin Prison, alongside figures of the Shah’s regime who had long regarded him as an adversary-despite his being an independent thinker and a close advisor to the Shah during the collapse of the system. The meaning of his experience was harsh, and a lesson in itself: discursive reform without instruments, in times of rupture, transforms the reformer into a scapegoat.

Second: Shapour Bakhtiar – Reform in Stoppage Time

Shapour Bakhtiar represents the most precise model of the reformer summoned in “extra time.” Emerging from a nationalist–Mossadeghist tradition-associated with the legacy of former Iranian prime minister and later political prisoner Mohammad Mossadegh-Bakhtiar was a historic opponent of authoritarianism and a bearer of the Iranian national movement’s constitutional, parliamentary, and libertarian ethos.

He accepted the post of prime minister in the final days of the Shah’s rule, at a moment when state institutions had already eroded and the street had moved beyond reformist demands toward total rupture. Bakhtiar introduced meaningful yet belated reformist measures (the dissolution of SAVAK, the expansion of political freedoms, and a pledge to hold elections), but these steps came after political time had expired. Unsurprisingly, the public did not trust him, he lacked influence within a disintegrating state apparatus, and he received no decisive backing from either the palace or the military establishment.

Bakhtiar’s experience points to a structural truth: the reformer summoned at the moment of collapse is burdened with responsibility for a failure he did not create, and is left alone to confront a downfall that began long before his arrival.

Third: Hassan Rouhani – Reform as Reinterpretation, Not Rupture

Hassan Rouhani represents a different kind of story, and an experience that warrants sustained reflection. He is a composite product of the Iranian system’s structure, formed at the core of the security–religious establishment before gradually repositioning himself within the space of moderation-not through rupture with the system, but through a reinterpretation of its function and limits.

Politically, Rouhani was deeply embedded in the heart of the deep state: a member of parliament, a member of the Assembly of Experts, secretary-general of the Supreme National Security Council, and a key negotiator on the nuclear file (earning the sobriquet the diplomatic sheikh), before ultimately becoming president. This background granted him internal credibility that enabled him to open major strategic files, yet it also constrained him, transforming him into a guardian of balance rather than a breaker of it.

Religiously, Rouhani belongs to the tradition of “state jurisprudence” (fiqh al-dawla) rather than “revolutionary jurisprudence” (fiqh al-thawra)-an administrative–interpretive presence that reconciles religious legitimacy with the requirements of governance, without pushing for deep jurisprudential revisions that might transcend the established ceiling of velayat-e faqih. His transformation from a security figure into a symbol of moderation was the result of accumulated experience with sanctions and confrontation, as well as a profound personal and familial tragedy (the suicide of his eldest son, Mohammad, in the early 1990s, accompanied by a painful letter of protest). Sheikh Rouhani thus came to embody a form of pragmatic moderation, aimed more at saving the state from exhaustion than at reconstituting an internal social contract.

Rouhani was surrounded by a moderate team with high negotiating competence but a weak social base-strong externally, cautious internally. He wagered that the lifting of sanctions would produce automatic political de-escalation, and therefore chose management over confrontation, postponing domestic reform until after foreign policy success. Rouhani arrived at a rare moment of opportunity, yet failed to convert it into internal reform. The structural implication is clear: possessing political time without investing it may be more dangerous than losing it altogether-a reality that helps explain the severity of the moment inherited by Pezeshkian.

Fourth: Masoud Pezeshkian – Ethics in the Time of Exhaustion

Here enters Masoud Pezeshkian: a physician and heart surgeon, and former minister in the government of reformist president Mohammad Khatami (whose experience I have not included among the previous models-not due to its poverty, but because it merits a separate and detailed treatment). In Pezeshkian’s case, professional background appears as more than a biographical detail; it represents a logic of ethical action grounded in saving what is still possible, alleviating pain, and avoiding harm.

Politically, Masoud Pezeshkian belongs to an ethical reformist tradition that remains relatively distant from major economic patronage networks and closely connected to a social base exhausted by prolonged material deterioration. This base carried him to the presidency as an acknowledgment of the legitimacy of protest and a return of politics as a response to dignity. Yet he arrived at a moment that resembled stoppage time. Iran had already lost its external arenas and instruments through which it had long waged its confrontations, negotiations, and bargains, emerging with deep moral, military, and economic wounds. It had also lost an irreplaceable first line of military, political, and diplomatic leadership (Qassem Soleimani, Ebrahim Raisi, and Hossein Amir-Abdollahian)-a loss that, for those who know Iran well, is exceptionally difficult to compensate.

Pezeshkian thus assumed office in a moment of compound decline: inflation and the erosion of purchasing power, recurring cycles of protest and mistrust, the dominance of a security logic and a prolonged state of exception, and the retreat of the external project from a source of legitimacy into a burden of exhaustion. This is, unmistakably, not a moment of reform, but a moment of loss management.

Pezeshkian has lived-and continues to live-a struggle between the ethics of conviction (the legitimacy of protest and dignity) and the ethics of responsibility (the calculation of consequences and the prevention of breakdown). As chairman of the Supreme National Security Council, he is required to align with a coercive logic exercised by forces within the system against the very social base that brought him to power.

The decision here is not between right and wrong, but between two legitimate wrongs-a structural tragedy that deepens the reformist’s alienation from within power. If Pezeshkian is incapable of resolving the crisis from within the existing model, the problem lies in the model itself. Velayat-e faqih appears here, in its absolute form, as a pillar of legitimacy: dismantling it without a symbolic–jurisprudential alternative risks vacuum or militarization, while preserving it in its current form increasingly threatens the state more than it protects it. The issue, therefore, is not overthrow but a controlled descent from the tree, one that might preserve the minimum degree of cohesion.

Here, the legacy of Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri may represent the most coherent reference for reopening the debate from within the system. A founding partner who later became an internal critic, Montazeri led jurisprudential revisions using internal tools, clearly distinguishing between religious legitimacy and executive power. He called for limiting guardianship, stripping it of its executive character, and anchoring governance in the will of the people. The strength of this legacy lies in its nature as a belated historical correction rather than a revolutionary alternative.

Montazeri’s legacy-he was the former deputy to the Leader of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, who removed him from office roughly three months before his death-redefines religious guidance as a moral–jurisprudential authority without executive power, while transferring full administration to elected institutions, enhancing accountability, depoliticizing and professionalizing the armed and security institutions, and rebuilding legitimacy on a social-contractual basis, while preserving religious symbolism as conscience rather than guardianship.

In conclusion, this reading seeks to interpret Pezeshkian’s predicament not as a personal ordeal (despite the sensitivity of the personal dimension), but as a test of the viability of reform when it is summoned after its time has passed. Ultimately, Iran will not emerge from its crisis through rupture with itself, but through a re-reading of its contested heritage. Montazeri’s legacy offers an internal language of transition without humiliation-a descent from the tree without falling from it. Yet time is narrow, and the window does not remain open for long. What is not seized in moments of exposure may not become available again. At this juncture, the so-called “carpet strategy” and strategic patience no longer appear as sources of strength or exceptionalism in Iranian politics; for the nation that invented chess has lost many of its battles throughout history because of a single wrong move made too late.