President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan on Sunday said that he would soon congratulate Iran’s newly-elected president, Masoud Pezeshkian, and said they hoped ties between the two countries would be better during his tenure. “Iran is an important neighbor, and Türkiye is the only country in the region with the best relations with Iran,” he told reporters.
Pezeshkian won a runoff election on Friday against the ultraconservative Saeed Jalili to replace President Ebrahim Raisi, who died in a helicopter crash in May.
The 69-year-old reformist secured more than 16 million votes, around 54%, with Jalili winning more than 13 million, roughly 44%, out of about 30 million votes cast.
The new president found wide coverage in Turkish media for his part-Turkic roots. His father is an Iranian Azerbaijani, while his mother hails from Iran’s Kurdish community.
Erdoğan stated that Iran has been an important neighbor of Türkiye with its historic and cultural ties and they anticipated Turkish-Iranian ties will prevail with “an increasing tempo and on a positive trend.”
Türkiye and Iran put away their hostilities in the 17th century and, since then, pursued close ties, regardless of regime changes, replacing an empire with a republic, etc. But culturally close ties occasionally strained over other conflicts in the region. More recently, Ankara and Tehran found themselves on opposing sides in the Syria civil war, with Tehran backing the Assad regime and Türkiye siding with the opposition. Yet, the situation never actually translated into an all-out conflict between the two neighbors while trade relations between Türkiye and Iran remained unaffected.
