The death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter accident on May 19 not only left the Islamic Republic of Iran without the head of its Executive. Raisí’s name was suggested as a possible successor to the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and also to preside over the Assembly of Experts, the body in which 88 men sit who must elect the cleric who will occupy Khamenei’s position when he is die. That succession is approaching inexorably; The Iranian supreme leader turned 85 in April, but until Raisí’s abrupt disappearance, the path to try to ensure the continuity of the Islamic regime seemed set. The ill-fated president had the credentials of an ultra-conservative loyal to Khamenei and also had the green light from the Revolutionary Guard. He was a candidate who aroused consensus in the clerical establishment and in that powerful parallel army. His designation as his successor was not certain, but that possibility completely disappeared with his unexpected death.
The abrupt disappearance of the president does not seem capable of threatening the stability of the regime, but it does disrupt plans for the succession of its top leader. The Iranian regime has shown signs in recent years of seeking at all costs to maintain an ironclad status quo, for example by marginalizing reformists from institutions. These candidates, more moderate than ultra-conservatives like Raisí, have seen how they were massively prevented from attending the elections since the 2020 legislative elections. This ultra-conservative turn was sealed with the election of the late president in 2021, with the votes of only a third of the electorate. , and after the official body in charge of validating the candidates, the Council of Guardians, once again vetoed as candidates, not only these moderates, but even other conservatives who could overshadow Raisí.
With the Parliament already in the hands of the “principalists” – the conservative tendency that Raisí embodied – the authorities demonstrated their intention to eliminate any whim of change, no matter how limited, before and, above all, after the death of the leader. supreme. The repression of the demonstrations sparked by the death in police custody of Yina Mahsa Amini – a young woman detained in Tehran for wearing her veil incorrectly – demonstrated again in 2022 and 2023 the will to silence the voices calling for change.
Raisí’s death has forced the regime to modify some steps already planned, which reinforce the hypothesis that the missing man was one of the candidates in contention to become the next supreme leader. For example, in the Assembly of Experts, for whose presidency Raisí was the favorite.
On May 21, the day after the death of the president and the members of his entourage was confirmed, this commitment to continuity became clear with the election of the cleric Mohammad Ali Movahedi Kermani, 93, as president of the Assembly of Experts. In a country where, in 2021, 23% of the population had not turned 15 years old, according to the World Bank, and where the 2022 protests were led by young people and women, several older members of the Assembly of Experts They attended the inaugural session of the organization’s new mandate accompanied by caregivers. Like Raisí, Kermani is a Khamenei loyalist who in the past was linked to the Revolutionary Guard.
A gerontocracy in a young country
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This cleric who will have a say in the election of the new supreme leader has defended ultra-conservative positions on these issues, such as the use of the veil, which in Iran transcend the social to enter fully into the political. He has come to declare haram (illegal according to Islam) to the Telegram messaging application, which many Iranians use to communicate. Kermani embodies the past and immobility. Also the abyss between, on the one hand, the power of a clerical gerontocracy, which relies on a force that many Iranians consider repressive, the Revolutionary Guard, and, on the other, a large part of a young population—especially women—who longs for change. All this in a context of “generational, economic crisis [la inflación lleva años por encima del 40%] and institutional, a challenge for the maintenance of the institutional architecture of the Islamic Republic,” says Spanish-Iranian analyst Daniel Bashandeh.
Political scientist and expert on Iran Ali Alfoneh, from the Gulf Arab States Institute in Washington, says by email that the Assembly of Experts has already prepared “a list of clerics, whom it considers constitutionally qualified for leadership.” “However, as in the 1989 succession following the death of Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founder of the Islamic Republic, we cannot expect the most religiously qualified candidate to prevail,” he explains.
The reason Alfoneh alludes to is that, in his opinion, in Khamenei’s succession, the fundamental actor will be the Revolutionary Guard, the parallel army that has acquired almost complete power over the country’s economy, while securing a good portion of political power. This political scientist maintains that, having lost its “religious and popular legitimacy,” the clerical establishment depends on that force “for its physical protection and survival,” which is why the clerics are “hostages of that praetorian guard.” In the protests unleashed by Amini’s death, the Revolutionary Guard and its associated militia, the Basij, were the main protagonists of the repression.
Names
In this context, the pools of possible successors of Ayatollah Khamenei “are speculations,” says Daniel Bashandeh. Precisely, this analyst emphasizes, one of the most popular names, that of Mojtaba Khamenei, son of the current leader, is “unlikely”, given that this “hereditary” succession would go against “the foundations of the Islamic Republic”, and would be a “risky” bet that would further detract from the legitimacy of the regime. Another of those possible candidates is also a descendant of the other Iranian supreme leader. This is Hassan Khomeini, grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini, an election that would try to provide religious and historical legitimacy to the new leadership due to the aura that still surrounds the founder of the current Iranian political system in a sector of the country’s population.
For now, Bashandeh says, Tehran is limiting itself to trying to show “stability and continuity” after Raisí’s death. After that event, the authorities rushed to name Vice President Mohammad Mojber as acting president and immediately called presidential elections on June 28. In these elections, the only unknown will once again be the punishment vote of abstention, since the authorities will probably once again veto all candidates who could overshadow the one chosen by power.
But in Iran “nothing is ever so clear,” adds Luciano Zaccara, professor at the Center for Gulf Studies at Qatar University, via WhatsApp. This specialist believes that the upcoming presidential elections may be precisely a test of the balance of power that will probably mark the future succession of the supreme leader.
Zaccara offers an example. One of the possible candidates for the presidential election is the former president of the Iranian Parliament Ali Larijaní, a politician considered pragmatic—or moderate—who in 2021 was prevented by the regime from running for president in the presidential elections that Raisí won. Then, remember, “the supreme leader himself asked the Guardian Council [el organismo que veta o aprueba a los candidatos políticos] to allow him to attend, but the Revolutionary Guard vetoed it.” If Khamenei now supports Larijani to try to show greater openness and recover some of the lost credibility of the Iranian political system and, even so, this parallel army vetoes him again, this will mean that “who has the upper hand” It is the Revolutionary Guard.
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