TEHRAN, Iran (AP) — Iran’s hardline parliament on Wednesday approved all members of reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian’s cabinet, the first time in over two decades a leader has been able to get all of his officials through the body.
The approval marks an early win for Pezeshkian, a longtime lawmaker who found himself catapulted into the presidency after a helicopter crash in May killed his hardline predecessor.
Getting his officials approved shows Pezeshkian eschewed controversial choices to pick a cabinet of consensus, with names palatable to all of the power centers within Iran’s theocracy.
Underlining that point, Pezeshkian immediately posted online a picture of himself standing next to Iran’s judiciary chief, a Shiite cleric, and the country’s parliament speaker, a hardliner he once faced in the election.
“Consensus for Iran,” he wrote in the caption.
Iran’s former foreign minister Mohamamad Javad Zarif, who championed Pezeshkian in the election campaign, had resigned as vice president on August 12 over Pezeshkian’s cabinet picks, which included several hardliners and just one woman.
Among those in Pezeshkian’s new cabinet is Abbas Araghchi, 61, a career diplomat who will be Iran’s new foreign minister.
Araghchi was a member of the Iranian negotiating team that reached a nuclear deal with world powers in 2015 that capped Tehran’s nuclear program in return for the lifting of sanctions.
In 2018, then-president Donald Trump pulled the United States out of the deal and imposed more sanctions on Iran. Pezeshkian said during his presidential campaign that he would try to revive the nuclear deal.
The candidate who received the most support from lawmakers was the country’s new defense minister, Aziz Nasirzadeh, who received 281 votes out of 288 present lawmakers. The chamber has 290 seats.
Nasirzadeh was chief of the Iranian air force from 2018 to 2021.
Health Minister Mohammad Reza Zafarghandi received the lowest number of votes with 163.
The only female minister proposed, Housing and Road Minister Farzaneh Sadegh, a 47-year-old architect, received 231 votes. She is the first female minister in Iran in more than a decade.
The parliament also approved Pezeshkian’s proposed Intelligence Minister Ismail Khatib, as well as Justice Minister Amin Hossein Rahimi, both of whom served under the late President Ebrahim Raisi. Pezeshkian also put Raisi’s minister of industries, Abbas Aliabadi, in the post of energy minister.
Dropping proposed ministers has been a tradition in Iran’s parliament, making Pezeshkian’s success that much more striking. Former reformist president Mohammad Khatami was the only president who received a vote of confidence for all of his proposed ministers, in both 1997 and 2001.