The death of the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, in a helicopter crash on Sunday night immediately set off speculation about the succession of the next supreme leader. Raisi was widely considered to be a leading candidate to replace Ali Khamenei, who is in his mid-80s and reportedly in poor health. His departure from the pool of possible candidates has raised the question of whether this could be an opportunity for the Iranian regime to widen political participation in the country by reinstating moderates and reformist figures into some state functions.
But this is unlikely. Over the past few years, the inner circle of the regime in Iran has been shrinking and will continue to do so. Raisi’s death pushes Iran even further in this direction.
A prevailing myth about the ruling regime in Iran is that it harbours two competing political currents, hardliners and reformists, with one or the other prevailing at any given point. Hardliners are hardened Islamists who believe that Iran is a resistance force against a hegemonic west, while reformists are more pragmatic moderates who believe in some degree of engagement with the international order. The two currents do exist, but inhabit different places in the state system, with hardliners generally dominating reformists – and utilising them when necessary.
At the highest levels, the Iranian regime is run by hardliners. Policy and strategy are made by the hardline supreme leader. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the elite military entity executing Iranian foreign policy and military interventions across the Middle East and beyond, reports to him. There is no clear separation between clerical and military functions.
Reformists have been permitted to inhabit the softer components of state bureaucracy in administrative rather than decision-making roles, but even this presence has dwindled over the years. If the hardliners judge that Iran would benefit from projecting a reformist image to the wider world, reformist figures are allowed to emerge in senior public roles. This is what happened with the election of Hassan Rouhani as president in 2013, coinciding with negotiations over the nuclear deal.
Hardliners are able to steer the election process because no candidate is allowed to run in a presidential or parliamentary election without prior approval by the Guardian Council, which is appointed by the supreme leader.
Raisi was no reformist; his overseeing of mass executions in the 1980s earned him the moniker “the butcher of Tehran”. The Guardian Council’s vetting process before his election in 2021 meant that he won the presidential election without facing a serious challenge. His selection after Rouhani came at a time when the US had withdrawn from the nuclear deal and the supreme leader no longer felt it necessary to project a softer image for Iran on the international stage. With Iran currently embroiled in a tense conflict with Israel, there is no desire in Iran to shift political direction. It is likely that whoever replaces Raisi in the next presidential election on 28 June will be another hardline figure close to the supreme leader.
As Khamenei approached his 80s, he began shifting the Iranian regime to become increasingly insular. Khamenei is concerned about succession and wants to ensure that he is replaced by someone who will carry on the same policy and strategy. Every cycle of selecting members of the Assembly of Experts, the deliberative body that selects the supreme leader and over which Khamenei exerts significant influence, has brought in an increasingly hardening core of Khamenei loyalists.
The US withdrawal from the nuclear deal in 2018 and its assassination of the IRGC senior commander Qasem Soleimani in 2020 only confirmed to Khamenei that the survival of the regime depended on weeding out divergence and on projecting an image of defiance to a west that cannot be trusted. This is why he tasked Raisi with crushing the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in 2022, and why in the last parliamentary elections in March 2024, hardliners won the majority of seats.
The Iranian regime has gone too far towards tightening control and insularity to reverse tack. Any compromise risks showing the supreme leader as weak. With Israel continuing to expose Iran’s military vulnerabilities through its strategic attacks on Iranian proxies in Lebanon, Syria and Iraq, as well as through the symbolic attack on Isfahan last month, the regime in Iran is on high alert about infiltration. This is not the time for a hardline regime to soften its grip or extend its hands to anyone but ultra-loyalists.
That said, the exact figure who will take the position is still unclear. Raisi’s elimination from the picture and increased regime insularity could boost Khamenei’s son Mojtaba’s chances of taking over. Some observers think that the Iranian regime shuns nepotism because it wants to distance itself from monarchism. But Raisi’s widow is the daughter of a member of the Assembly of Experts who is known for being a staunch Khamenei supporter (and also a possible supreme leader candidate), while Soleimani’s daughter Zeinab is married to the son of the chief of Hezbollah’s executive council, Hashem Safieddine; Safieddine is also the maternal cousin of Hezbollah’s secretary general, Hassan Nasrallah.
If anything, the death of Raisi should serve to expedite a decision on succession in Iran. But it will not cause a change in political direction for the country, neither internationally nor domestically. With fewer people around to trust, the Iranian regime’s inner circle will continue to shrink, with the clerical and military elements of the regime fusing together more solidly than ever before.
Lina Khatib is director of the Soas Middle East Institute and associate fellow at the Middle East and North Africa programme at Chatham House
