Re­formist can­di­date Ma­soud Pezeshkian won Iran’s runoff pres­i­den­tial elec­tion Sat­ur­day, best­ing hard-lin­er Saeed Jalili by promis­ing to reach out to the West and ease en­force­ment on the coun­try’s manda­to­ry head­scarf law af­ter years of sanc­tions and protests squeez­ing the Is­lam­ic Re­pub­lic.

Pezeshkian promised no rad­i­cal changes to Iran’s Shi­ite theoc­ra­cy in his cam­paign and long has held Supreme Leader Ay­a­tol­lah Ali Khamenei as the fi­nal ar­biter of all mat­ters of state in the coun­try. But even Pezeshkian’s mod­est aims will be chal­lenged by an Iran­ian gov­ern­ment still large­ly held by hard-lin­ers, the on­go­ing Is­rael-Hamas war in the Gaza Strip, and West­ern fears over Tehran en­rich­ing ura­ni­um to near-weapons-grade lev­els.

A vote count of­fered by au­thor­i­ties put Pezeshkian as the win­ner with 16.3 mil­lion votes to Jalili’s 13.5 mil­lion in Fri­day’s elec­tion. Over­all, Iran’s In­te­ri­or Min­istry said 30 mil­lion peo­ple vot­ed in an elec­tion held with­out in­ter­na­tion­al­ly rec­og­nized mon­i­tors.

Sup­port­ers of Pezeshkian, a heart sur­geon and long­time law­mak­er, en­tered the streets of Tehran and oth­er cities be­fore dawn to cel­e­brate as his lead grew over Jalili, a hard-line for­mer nu­clear ne­go­tia­tor.

“Dear peo­ple of Iran, the elec­tions are over and this is just the be­gin­ning of our co­op­er­a­tion,” Pezeshkian wrote on the so­cial plat­form X, still banned in Iran. “The dif­fi­cult path ahead will not be smooth ex­cept with your com­pan­ion­ship, em­pa­thy and trust. I ex­tend my hand to you and I swear on my hon­or that I will not leave you alone on this path. Do not leave me alone.”