The Death of an Iranian Hard-Liner

The sudden death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash on May 19 marked a momentous day for the Islamic Republic. His presidency ushered in a new era for his country, characterized by increased militarization abroad and growing tumult at home. Not since the 1979 revolution had Iran’s political system faced such a fast-paced transformation. Externally, the country surprised the world with its military capabilities and its willingness to deploy them. Internally, Iran grappled with rising secularization, putting society at odds with the government. These shifts meant that the Iran that exists today is very different from the one that existed when Raisi came to power just three years ago.

Without Raisi, it may seem like Iran is headed for a period of great turbulence. Before his ascent, Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, spent 30 years in near-constant conflict with Iran’s presidents, sparring over what path the country should take at home and abroad. But Raisi adopted Khamenei’s preferred, Middle East–first approach to foreign policy, expanding Iran’s regional influence and improving relations with its neighbors, including its rival, Saudi Arabia. He made sure that Iran’s presidential bureaucracy synced up with the supreme leader’s. He deepened ties with China and Russia and vastly expanded his country’s nuclear program. Raisi was so loyal to Khamenei that he was widely viewed as his heir apparent.

Yet it is unlikely that Raisi’s death will cause much tumult in Tehran. In fact, it is unlikely to prompt much change at all. Despite popular discontent and an expanding crisis of legitimacy, Iran’s powerful ruling class remains steadfast in its commitment to Raisi and Khamenei’s strategy. Iranian elites will ensure that the presidency stays in the hands of a loyal establishment conservative. They will keep the country’s policies steady. There will still be palace intrigue, as the country gears up for a snap election and ambitious politicians launch their candidacies to succeed Raisi. But Iran’s next president will almost certainly be just like its last one, and nationwide grief at Raisi’s death will ensure that the winning candidate has a smooth transition.

THICK AND THIN

Raisi’s rise to power began in the 1980s. Then a prosecutor and judge, he made a name for himself by having thousands of leftist prisoners executed. A student of Khamenei’s jurisprudence classes, he eventually advanced to become Iran’s attorney general, taking up the post in 2014. He next presided over a multibillion-dollar religious foundation in the holy city of Mashhad before being tapped in 2019 to head the judiciary.

Raisi ran to become Iran’s president in 2017, but lost to the incumbent, Hassan Rouhani. His defeat in that contest also turned into a defeat for Khamenei. Although the supreme leader controls key institutions, including the military forces, and sets Tehran’s overall policies, Iranian presidents control a vast bureaucracy and budget that give them many levers to shape, challenge, delay, or sabotage Khamenei’s programs. Iran’s presidents also derive some legitimacy from being elected directly, unlike the supreme leader. Rouhani, for example, used his power to chart a course far more moderate than that preferred by Khamenei, including pursuing a nuclear deal with the United States during his first term.

As a result, in the leadup to the 2021 election, Khamenei maneuvered to ensure that Raisi would win. Seizing on the collapse of the nuclear agreement, which was precipitated by the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the deal in 2018, the supreme leader had Iran’s Guardian Council disqualify all other serious contenders. The result was less a contest than a carefully managed coronation. With Khamenei’s blessing, Raisi won office with 62 percent of the vote—and the lowest voter turnout in the Islamic Republic’s history.

Many of Raisi’s supposed wins have little to do with his decisions.

Raisi took over the executive branch when Iran was under economic siege. The Trump administration had imposed crippling sanctions in 2019. U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration tried to leverage those sanctions to reach what Biden called a “longer and better” deal. But Raisi, unlike his predecessors, showed little interest in talks. Instead, he shifted Iran’s foreign policy from a westward-looking approach aimed at removing U.S. sanctions—what Khamenei derisively termed a “begging” foreign policy—to a more Middle Eastern and Asian- focused strategy aimed at neutralizing them. This policy aligned with the vision that Iran’s supreme leader had been advocating for decades.

The Iranian Foreign Ministry, for example, has traditionally been at odds with the supreme leader’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which prioritizes supporting Iran’s extensive network of nonstate proxies, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen. But Raisi tapped Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, a diplomat close to senior corps officials, to lead the ministry. (Amir-Abdollahian died in the helicopter crash with Raisi.) Once marginalized for being too tightly in sync with the IRGC, Amir-Abdollahian set about making sure that his ministry acted in tandem with the corps. He promoted other diplomats with ties to the IRGC and provided more support for Iran’s allied forces throughout the region

The result of this realignment was an assertive foreign policy. The IRGC, for example, was once so constrained by the Foreign Ministry that the head of the corps’ aerospace division bitterly complained about efforts by Rouhani’s officials to block missile tests. But when Raisi came to power, the IRGC began testing at will. It also began launching more outright missile attacks, such as the barrage unleashed on Israel in April after Israel bombed Iran’s embassy in Damascus. Under previous presidents, the corps might not responded with such force.

FOR BETTER AND FOR WORSE

The Raisi administration had some unambiguous accomplishments. It managed to reestablish relations with Saudi Arabia, for instance, and it forged new economic ties with China. According to the Financial Times, the Islamic Republic succeeded in increasing its oil exports from roughly 400,000 barrels per day to 1.5 million—despite crushing U.S. sanctions.

But many of Raisi’s supposed wins have little to do with his decisions. The new ties to China and Russia, for example, are the product of growing tensions between Washington and Beijing and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—not developments in Tehran. And many of the Iranian president’s other policies have failed. His attempt to create an inward-looking self-sufficient economic policy, an aim shared by Khamenei, fell flat. Raisi spent a significant portion of his presidency traveling throughout the country, reopening bankrupt factories, building roads, and initiating various infrastructure projects. In fact, he was returning from the opening ceremony for a dam when he died. But despite his claims that the Islamic Republic could thrive under Western sanctions, the country continued to suffer from major economic problems. The country’s inflation rate, for example, has remained above 40 percent.

Raisi also faced social unrest. Even government-sponsored reports acknowledge that Iran is rapidly becoming more secular. The vast majority of the population supports separating religion and politics, and many Iranian women walk around unveiled, particularly in major urban centers. The government’s decision to arrest and jail people for doing so prompted major protests in 2022. Even some traditionally conservative women are now bucking the regime’s dress code, if only to avoid being associated by other Iranians with the political system and its failures (especially its draconian human rights record).

Raisi continued to enforce the country’s dress requirements, and he responded to the mass protests with more mass executions. But despite the violence, the Islamic Republic is reluctantly acknowledging its population’s secular shift. During the 2021 presidential campaign, for example, women who did not adhere to traditional veiling practices appeared in pro-Raisi advertisements. And today, state-controlled media show people from all walks of life paying respect to the late president. In a television interview from a vigil in Tehran, one mournful, partially unveiled woman told Iran’s state broadcaster that although her “appearance may not be what it should be,” nobody had forced her to attend. “I came here myself with all my being.”

MEET THE NEW BOSS

Raisi’s vice president, Mohammad Mokhber, is now the country’s acting president. Like Raisi, he is a Khamenei loyalist; Mokhber joined the administration after overseeing business conglomerates controlled by the supreme leader. But his tenure may not last long. Under Iran’s constitution, a new election must be held within 50 days, and multiple candidates will vie for the presidency.

The election could reopen Iran’s old factional wounds as candidates from different camps enter the race, only to be disqualified. Yet such an outcome is unlikely. Instead, the tragic circumstances leading to the election will probably strengthen conservatives’ hands, mending or covering over such fault lines. Prominent moderates are already mourning Raisi: Rouhani, for example, has offered condolences, as has another moderate former president, Mohammad Khatami. They have done so even though they have been marginalized from politics by Khamenei.

The national mourning could shape more than just this election: it could mold the presidency in the image of Raisi for years to come. The country’s clerical elite will memorialize the late president as the kind of loyal Iranian public servant that all future presidents should aspire to be. Their ideal successor will, accordingly, be a conservative associate of Raisi—someone capable of quickly assuming office and ensuring that “there will be no disturbances in the country’s affairs,” as Khamenei promised in his first statement about the helicopter crash in which Raisi perished.

In the official narrative, Raisi will be remembered for putting Iran on the right path.

Iranian society itself might also embrace Khamenei’s policies. Iran’s elite may struggle to win over the public through religious messaging, but it does gain support by promoting nationalistic narratives that portray Iran as a great power under siege from the West. After the United States assassinated the senior IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani in 2020, for example, the country experienced a powerful rally-round-the flag effect, with hundreds of thousands of Iranians coming out to pay tribute. Although Raisi’s death was an accident, it could have a similar effect. Because he was killed while serving the nation, the government declared him a martyr. In a country facing external challenges, his death while on duty will resonate with many citizens, particularly the regime’s base. The Islamic Republic is a resourceful system that benefits from having loyal elites, living and dead.

None of this means that Raisi’s death will deal no damage to Iran. The president was viewed as the top contender to be Iran’s next supreme leader, and Khamenei, age 85, will now have to scramble to find someone else. There is no clear answer to who that might be. Some analysts have speculated that Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei, and the current head of the judiciary, Gholam-Hossein Mohseni Ejei, are the leading candidates. But ultimately, the individual chosen may not matter as much as the kingmaker. The conservative institutions that choose the next supreme leader, and that backed Raisi as president and as a potential successor to Khamenei, will have great power over whoever comes next.

That means that Iran’s long-term trajectory is unlikely to change. Whoever becomes president will be a loyal insider. He will be as politically similar to Raisi as one can be. In fact, Raisi’s successor could even explicitly claim the latest president’s mantle. After all, in the official narrative of the Islamic Republic, Raisi will be remembered for putting Iran on the right path after a series of presidents who challenged the supreme leader’s vision. He will be memorialized for positioning Iran as a nuclear threshold state and establishing it as a rising power—and for doing so not despite external pressure, but because of it.

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