Man behind the challenge to Rouhani’s leadership
Raisi focuses on the poor, with a vow to triple cash benefits
TEHRAN // Ebrahim Raisi, the leading rival to president Hassan Rouhani in tomorrow’s presidential election, is a hardline judge with close ties to the supreme leader, who spent years in powerful backroom positions.
Born in the holy city of Mashhad on August 23, 1960, Mr Raisi has an austere charisma and is surrounded by an entourage with ties to the regime’s most hardline elements.
He has focused his campaign on the poor, brandishing his credentials as the head of the Imam Reza shrine in Mashhad, which is also a powerful and wealthy charitable foundation.
“I represent the workers, the farmers, the impoverished women,” he says, vowing to triple cash hand-outs.
It is a message that has fallen on fertile ground at a time when unemployment is at least 12.5 per cent and almost everyone is feeling the stagnation of the economy.
He does not oppose the nuclear deal signed with world powers in 2015, which lifted sanctions in exchange for curbs to Iran’s atomic programme.
But he says the current government’s negotiating efforts were weak and called for a much tougher line.
There is little chance Mr Raisi will ease social restrictions or release opposition leaders held under house arrest since the 2009 protest movement. “Those who sympathise with the heads of sedition must know that Iran will never forgive this great injustice,” he said in 2014.
Mr Raisi has served as attorney general, supervisor of state broadcaster Irib and prosecutor in the special court for clerics.
His father-in-law leads Friday prayers in Mashhad and both have seats on the Assembly of Experts that will choose the next supreme leader – a position for which Mr Raisi himself is often rumoured to be in the running.
Mr Raisi’s father died when he was 5, and he entered the seminary at an early age, excelling in his studies and moving to the seat of clerical learning in Qom in 1975.
After the 1979 revolution, he was selected for special training by the clerical establishment and studied under Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who would later become supreme leader.
In the middle of the Iran-Iraq war In 1985, he became deputy prosecutor at the revolutionary court of Tehran that would oversee the execution of thousands of political prisoners.
After serving in powerful judicial posts, Mr Raisi was appointed in March last year by Ayatollah Khamenei to head the Imam Reza shrine.