Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has not always seen eye to eye with his country’s presidents. Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani nudged the Islamic Republic too close to the West for the supreme leader’s liking. Mohammad Khatami rattled the conservative elite with subversive talk of how faith and freedom could coexist. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was too insubordinate and too populist, while Hassan Rouhani’s flirtation with the Americans and his disappointing arms-control agreement drove him out of the inner circle.
President Ebrahim Raisi, on the other hand, was Mr. Khamenei’s ideal partner. A lackluster manager with dispiriting rhetoric and a vicious streak, he was steadfastly loyal to Mr. Khamenei, who is 85 years old, and an integral part of his plan to ensure a smooth succession. Mr. Raisi’s sudden death in a helicopter crash on Sunday has thrown that plan into disarray, scrambled Iran’s backroom politics and could further empower a younger, more radical generation of politicians that would bring further repression at home and aggression overseas.
Mr. Raisi was a revolutionary with an ideologue’s integrity. Early on he was appointed to various prosecutorial roles, where he regularly sought — and secured — the execution of regime opponents. In 1988, he firmed up that reputation by serving on the so-called death commissions that executed upward of 5,000 political prisoners. He then spent much of his career in the regime’s darker corners, becoming the head of the judiciary before being elevated to the presidency.
Despite this deep experience and loyalty, it wasn’t clear that Mr. Raisi would be a suitable successor to Mr. Khamenei, a development many observers and Iranians feared. The challenge of managing a government at odds with much of its population and the international community requires an unusual mixture of cunning, intelligence and cruelty. Mr. Raisi only possessed the last. But even if his ascension was uncertain, Mr. Khamenei still relied upon the cleric to help manage the coming transition: Mr. Raisi was reportedly part of a three-man committee vested with the responsibility to choose the next supreme leader.
Mr. Khamenei will now need to find someone else as reliable to execute, as ruthlessly as required, his vision, and arrange another contrived election to install him. This will not be easy: Iran’s political system has been so relentlessly purged of those present at the creation of the republic that little of the old establishment is left.
The new political landscape is largely dominated by younger men who openly lament the older generation’s corruption, lack of revolutionary zeal and unwillingness to take on more forcefully a fading American imperium. And because Mr. Khamenei must rely on this new group to sustain the revolution’s values and keep the theocracy intact, he will have to take their sensibilities into account as he considers both the next president and who should succeed him as supreme leader.
This new cohort has been toughened by battling various popular insurrections. Many have served in the security services and the Revolutionary Guards. They have a strong showing in the hard-line Paydari Party, which now holds the majority in parliament. Among its most vocal members are Morteza Aqa-Tehrani, one of the party’s leaders, and Mehrdad Bazrpash, the minister of roads and urban development in Mr. Raisi’s government. They favor presidential contenders like Saeed Jalili, a former nuclear negotiator, who has demonstrated contempt for international norms and democratic accountability.
Mr. Raisi had little to say about matters beyond Iran’s borders. Foreign affairs really wasn’t his domain, though he did support the regime’s imperial adventures and recent clash with Israel. But Mr. Khamenei’s more youthful disciples have come of age as America has been retrenching in the Middle East, enjoying the talk in Washington of getting out of America’s so-called forever wars. Unlike many of their “neither East nor West” elders, they’ve welcomed the Chinese and Russian alliance with Iran and see the international arena, unlike the home front, as a domain where they can succeed.
The rising influence of this younger generation in the wake of Mr. Raisi’s death may also have a significant effect on Iran’s nuclear calculations. What appeared to be Mr. Khamenei’s cautious approach to constructing and testing a nuclear device may give way to voices eager to get on with it. The effort, on the other hand, of marshaling multinational proxy forces to do Iran’s bidding in the region will almost certainly persist unaltered, as its success is hard to question.
The larger issue of Mr. Khamenei’s succession, of course, also still hangs over the republic. It is often suggested that his son Mojtaba might assume his father’s mantle. The Islamic Republic may have dispensed with charismatic authority and theological erudition as preconditions for that post, but it does not favor dynastic succession, which is still seen by revolutionary leaders as an indulgence of Persian monarchs and Arab presidents. The younger Khamenei may continue to have an outsized role in the background, but his formal promotion would be difficult for Iran’s leaders to justify. That means another hard-line cleric of some stature and close ties to the security services will likely be considered, such as Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami, a member of the Assembly of Experts tasked with selecting the next supreme leader.
All this augurs poorly for the Iranian people and the international community alike. The generation on the cusp of taking power sees domestic oppression and foreign aggression as indispensable to the success of the revolution. They are even more resentful of the public’s widely held democratic aspirations than Mr. Raisi’s generation, equating all forms of dissent with sedition against the republic and the faith. Mr. Raisi’s death may give these younger men an opportunity to finally have their day.
Reuel Marc Gerecht is a resident scholar at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. Ray Takeyh is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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