How Europe will have to tread carefully with Iran's moderate new president

Iranian president-elect Masoud Pezeshkian, a moderate by his country's standards, has promised to open up dialogue with Western powers — but he doesn't want radical changes to his country's Shiite theocracy.

To prove this point, the heart surgeon and long-time legislator went to the mausoleum of the late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, to celebrate his victory in the country's recent election.

Majid Golpour, an expert in international politics and professor at the Free University of Brussels, says the decision to pay his respects to the Ayatollah was a clear signal.

"As soon as the results were published, the first place he chose to make a public announcement was the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini," argued Golpour. "So it doesn't get any more conservative than that at the moment."

The academic says that Pezeshkian has set his sights on a short-term agenda, and that for this, he is willing to "accept certain reforms and modifications that will allow him to work with those who don't get along so well with the Islamic Republic of Iran, but also that could be a way out of the current crisis".

The new president will have to prove himself worthy of succeeding the late President Ebrahim Raisi, whose death in a helicopter crash in May triggered early elections. Raisi was seen as a protégé of the current Ayatollah, Alii Khamenei, and a potential successor as supreme leader.

Pezeshkian will have to navigate a government still largely dominated by hardliners that remains under pressure from the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza Strip, all amid Western fears that the regime will enrich enough weapons-grade uranium to produce multiple nuclear weapons.

The 2015 deal meant to curb the regime's