Where Is Iran Headed?

It was, for Iran, a day of shock and disbelief. First came the reports that a helicopter, which had been carrying the country’s president and foreign minister back from a visit to Azerbaijan, had crashed deep in the mountains. Then came the flurry of contradictory statements. Tehran’s unease was not difficult to understand. As the country’s Islamic government navigates the stormy seas of an ever-escalating regional crisis with Israel and the West, the sudden decapitation of its leadership promised to add to the chaos. When Ebrahim Raisi was finally confirmed dead, together with Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and a number of other top officials, the Tehran regime was left weakened—and the Middle East, one of the world’s most decisive regions, boiled with uncertainty.

For the 44-year-old Islamic Republic, the events of May 19th could hardly have come at a more inconvenient moment. It was only a month ago that the world held its breath as, in a significant escalation, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard attacked Israeli territory with hundreds of cruise and ballistic missiles, as well as swarm after swarm of suicide drones. The move, a response to Israel’s earlier killing of a number of important Iranian officials in the country’s embassy in Damascus, left the region closer than ever to a general conflagration. Though Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own retaliation, an airstrike against air defence targets near Isfahan, was careful and non-escalatory in essence, the dramatic tone of the developments once again put Iran at the forefront of one of the world’s most dangerous hotspots.

Raisi: Khamenei’s Dauphin?

For Tehran, the current geopolitical crisis is compounded by rising difficulties at home. Chief among these is the upcoming succession of Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei. Now 85 years old, Khamenei has long been rumoured to be suffering from an undisclosed illness. As recently as 2022, the ageing leader is known to have undergone surgery; and, his poor health appears to have led to the cancellation of public engagements for some time. The matter is of high importance for the country’s fractious political system. Although Iranians choose a president every four years in elections that are internationally seen as neither free nor fair, it is the supreme leader who holds real power. 

Formally, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is the highest authority in the land, with control over Iran’s foreign policy, military, judiciary, and propaganda apparatus. Additionally, beyond his official and constitutionally defined prerogatives, the powerful supreme leader of Iran accrues vast informal influence through his control, for example, of the bonyads—religious foundations that, under clerical management, still hold sway over more than 20% of the nation’s economy. This business empire is worth hundreds of billions of dollars, controlling everything from hotels to automotive plants, and gives Khamenei enormous direct influence over the country.

With the supreme leader as the undisputed nucleus of the regime, the post-Khamenei transition will be of fundamental importance. The incumbent’s support for Raisi’s victorious presidential campaign in 2021 was likely designed to boost the latter’s standing as heir apparent. In the view of the regime’s elites, the late president sported impeccable Islamist credentials. Raisi did his clerical studies in Qom, the nation’s religious capital. After the 1979 Islamic revolution that led to the overthrow of the Pahlavi dynasty, he rose rapidly within the ranks, becoming prosecutor for Karaj, a major provincial city, by the age of 21. Later, as deputy prosecutor general in Tehran, Raisi became infamous as a member of the ‘death commission’ that convicted many thousands of anti-regime Iranians to death. That wave of merciless repression was among the Islamic Republic’s foulest acts. More recently, Raisi had further cemented his role as a grandee with a number of top jobs; his career included serving as Iran’s attorney general as well as managing or overseeing some of the nation’s wealthiest bonyads. This included Setad, a vast empire with assets estimated to be worth over a hundred billion dollars.

Raisi’s reputation as a hardliner made him well regarded among the regime’s most important powerbrokers. His preference for an aggressive form of politics, at home and abroad, led him to be seen as a faithful continuator of Khamenei’s legacy. This pleased the fundamentalist Shi’ite religious apparatus, eager to protect its influence and preserve the system of Velayat-e Faqih (ولایت فقیه), or “Rule of the Islamic Jurist,” which stands as the bedrock of modern Iran’s political system and legitimises the clergy’s ultimate power over temporal matters. 

As president, Raisi ended the process of economic reform pioneered by his predecessor, the more moderate Hassan Rohani, choosing instead to further entrench the Shi’ite clergy’s already enormous control over the economy. At the same time, Raisi’s commitment to a militant anti-Western, anti-Israeli foreign policy, including to continuous support for Islamist proxies such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Yemen’s Ansarullah (or Houthi movement), and Gaza’s Hamas terror group, gave the military-industrial complex—and, in particular, the all-powerful Revolutionary Guard—the strongest of indications that their influence over Iran’s foreign policy would be left untouched.

Out with the old, in with the new

Raisi’s disappearance from the political chessboard will leave the regime scrambling for alternatives. There aren’t many. Even if Rouhani had not been sidelined by Khamenei, his age alone—75—determines that his leadership would, at best, be transitory. At 51, Hassan Khomeini, Ayatollah Khomeini’s grandson, would be in a much better position to take over the helm of the state. But the younger Khomeini would almost assuredly elicit significant resistance from the regime’s most uncompromising wing. Somewhat surprisingly, the Ayatollah’s grandson has long been critical of military influence on Iranian politics, and he has been an advocate of regime liberalisation. During the 2009 ‘Green Revolution’ protests against election fraud, he was a vocal supporter of defeated presidential candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, who ended up being arrested for his defiance of the establishment. Later, in 2016, he was reported to have considered running for president—a project from which he was reportedly dissuaded by Khamenei himself.

As things stand, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei seems most likely to be succeeded in the office by his son, Mojtaba. At 54, the younger Khamenei also has the potential for a long reign. And, unlike Hassan Khomeini, there is no reason for the Islamist establishment to doubt his allegiances. Instead, while Hassan Khomeini aligned himself—and all the political weight his name and lineage carry—with Mousavi and his ‘Green’ supporters, it was Mojtaba who took over the regime’s Praetorian Guard, the Basij, to crush the pro-opposition demonstrations. His commitment to his father’s legacy—and, more broadly, to regime orthodoxy—is not in question. In all likelihood, he would have the support of the Revolutionary Guard and other hardliners for his candidacy. 

While Mojtaba would reassure these factions as leader, succeeding his father will still be politically complex. For a regime whose legitimacy ultimately rests on anti-monarchical animus, a father-to-son succession is inevitably a hard sell. Before Raisi’s death in February, the supreme leader had even sensed the need to deny any suggestion of an emerging Khamenei dynasty. Now that the tables have turned, this apparent display of nepotism is worsened by Mojtaba’s lack of religious clout. If he indeed becomes Iran’s next supreme leader, he will have neither Raisi’s wealth of experience as a regime apparatchik nor comparable autonomy from the manifold factions vying for control of the country’s future. As a result of being more vulnerable to their influence, he will preside over a system where power is far more diffuse and polycentric. He will also be more reliant on Iran’s two distinct, and often competing, militaries: the Iranian Army (Artesh) and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (Sepah). The Revolutionary Guard has long acted as a key force in Iranian politics, with Ali Khamenei using it as a key source of support and opposing proposals, such as those of President Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, to merge it with the less ideologically committed Artesh. 

Ali Khamenei has long embodied modern Iran’s authoritarian reality. His seniority, longevity in the post, and prestige among regime cadres, as well as a carefully built network of unofficial control, allowed the ageing Ayatollah to remain Iran’s true centre of political gravity. This allowed him, at times, to surprise pundits by reaching across the aisle and favouring actors more eager to engage in diplomacy with the West, such as former President Rohani and his American-educated foreign minister, Mohammad Javad Zarif. However, things will be different for his son and likely successor. With its future leadership forced to outsource an unprecedented role in policymaking to the Revolutionary Guard and other factions heavily invested in regional and geopolitical adventurism, there is very little to suggest that what comes next is a less bellicose Iran.