Crash comes amid challenging times for Iran
The Iranian helicopter crash comes at a time when the country, faced by unprecedented external challenges, was already bracing itself for a change in regime with the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, now aged 85.
In the country’s hydra-headed leadership, where power is spread in often opaque ways between clerics, politicians and army, it is the supreme leader, and not the president, who is ultimately decisive.
In some ways the posts of president and prime minister – originally based on a model of the French constitution – became overwhelmed in the drafting of Iran’s constitution in 1979, leading to advocates of a more powerful presidency to claim the role was being subsumed in a form of autocracy created in the name of religion.
The presidency, however loyal to the supreme leader – and the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, is considered very loyal to Khamenei – is often cast in the role as a useful scapegoat helping the supreme leader to avoid criticism. That certainly became the fate of Raisi’s predecessor, Hassan Rouhani, who became a punchbag for decisions taken elsewhere.
In recent months Raisi, elected president in 2021 but in practice handpicked by the supreme leader, has been mentioned as a possible successor to Khamenei. His death, if confirmed, would instead clear a thorny path for Khamenei’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei.
The choice is made by an 88-strong “assembly of experts”, and Raisi’s departure would certainly increase the chances of a hereditary succession in Iran, something many clerics oppose as alien to Iran’s revolutionary principles.
But if Raisi has died, it will add to the sense of a country already in political transition. A new hardline parliament was only just elected on 1 March in a vote in which turnout for some of the contests fell below 10%, and which was overall presented as reaching a nationwide turnout of only 41%, a record low.
Reformist or moderate politicians were either disqualified or soundly beaten, leaving a new and as yet untested division in parliament between traditional hardliners and an ultraconservative group known as Paydari.
The effective exclusion of reformists from political participation in parliament for the first time since 1979 adds to the sense of a country in uncharted waters.
The cumulative disruption also comes at a time when Iran can ill afford such uncertainty, since it comes as the country faces western challenges over its nuclear programme, a dire economy and tense relations with other middle eastern states, especially over how to threaten Israel and US hegemony.
The possible loss of Hossein Amir Abdollahian, the foreign affairs minister, in the helicopter crash only adds to a sense of instability for a country that prided itself on control. His most likely successor is his deputy
Ali Bagheri, but hardliners may regard him as too willing to negotiate with the west over Iran’s nuclear programme.
Although Iran has not lost a president in office since the revolution in 1979, the country also has a clear formal system for succession in which the senior vice-president takes charge.
The immediate challenge of any new leader would be to control not just internal dissent, but the factional demands within the country for a tougher line with the west.
The perennial threat to Iran remains relations with Israel that reached a new pitch of danger when the two countries exchanged fire sparked by the Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus, and more broadly the support Iran has given to proxy groups willing to fight Israel, including Hamas and Hezbollah.
Opponents of the regime, still powerful through civil resistance, will not mourn news of Raisi’s death due to his role in repressing the women, life, freedom protests.
Older Iranians revile Raisi for his role as deputy prosecutor in Tehran in 1988 when he played a prominent role in a movement that sent as many 30,000 political prisoners to their deaths across the country.