Had the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, looked a touch less steely when delivering his eulogy, more Iranians might have believed the demise of his president was just an accident. Even Mr Khamenei’s officials contrasted his perfunctory manner towards the deaths of Ebrahim Raisi and Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, Iran’s foreign minister, in a helicopter crash on May 19th with the supreme leader’s uncontrollable sobbing after the assassination of his top commander, Qassem Suleimani, four years ago.
The rescue efforts compounded Iranians’ suspicions. First responders in the Red Crescent were stunned that rescue workers had to proceed on foot. Nor could they believe the delays they faced reaching the site. Strange, too, thought many in Iran, that the two helicopters escorting the president returned safely to Tabriz. The initial reports spoke of fog and “a hard landing”. But the helicopter, according to the rescue team, had exploded. Mr Raisi’s chief of staff, who was part of the convoy, claimed that the skies had been clear.
Mr Khamenei has every interest in downplaying this crisis. He is old and obsessed with who will succeed him. Iran’s population of almost 90m is exhausted by the many and ever more frequent shocks that disrupt their country. To prove his left hand is still steady at the wheel (his right was paralysed in an assassination attempt in the 1980s), Mr Khamenei swiftly named a caretaker president and a new foreign minister. Shops stayed open. The currency briefly tumbled but then recovered. “They’re showing it’s business as usual,” says a university lecturer in Tehran.
Mr Khamenei has a history of falling out with his presidents, so conspiracy theories of an inside job were inevitable. Even so, the thinly disguised relief of some around him has surprised Iranians. Of all Mr Khamenei’s five presidents, Mr Raisi was considered the most loyal. Many had tipped him to be the next supreme leader.
For decades Mr Khamenei had groomed him as the yes-man at the heart of his deep state. He was an obedient politician, cleric and sayyid, or descendant of the Prophet. Critically, he had no son to set up a rival dynasty. And his lack of charisma and nous seemed to lessen any threat to the power of Mr Khamenei and his son, Mojtaba, who manages his father’s powerful bayt, or household. “When you went to see [Mr Raisi], he’d talk just about whether you’d had lunch,” says an exiled Iranian who knew him. The Khameneis helped Mr Raisi rise through the ranks of the judiciary and the rich clerical foundations. In 2021 they engineered the presidential election to ensure he would win.
It did not go to plan. To Mojtaba, another contender for the succession, it seemed as if Mr Raisi was getting ahead of himself. He called himself ayatollah, one of the requirements for becoming supreme leader, though he lacked the qualifications. (Mr Khamenei pointedly dropped the title in his eulogy.) He enjoyed the backing of his father-in-law, the most powerful cleric in eastern Iran. And he even began acquiring an international profile. Such was his confidence, he had a public spat with Mohammed Bagher Qalibaf, the long-standing speaker of parliament and a close relative of Mr Khamenei with business ties to the bayt. As they say of someone rising in stature in Persian, “He had grown a tail.”
Some who know Mojtaba say he began to worry that Mr Raisi could be building a camp of malcontents within the establishment. Clerics muttered against the Khameneis for plotting to turn a revolution against a monarchy into another dynasty. Nationalist generals in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps complained of wasting their energy enforcing the wearing of the veil. And powerful families like the Rafsanjanis, who had lost power struggles with Mr Khamenei but retained much of their wealth, harboured dreams of revenge. “The winner from Raisi’s death is Mojtaba,” says a former presidential adviser.
Mr Raisi’s departure makes it easier to nudge things in Mojtaba’s favour. On May 21st Mr Khamenei reshuffled the Assembly of Experts, the body that selects the supreme leader where Mr Raisi had played a prominent role. In line with the constitution, the regime has also set the date for a new presidential election on June 28th. Once again, Mr Khamenei will look to the Guardian Council, the body that vets electoral candidates, to weed out undesirables. Possible candidates include the new caretaker president, Mohammad Mokhber, a loyal bureaucrat who has managed the bayt’s huge business empires, or Saeed Jalili, a hardline conservative and former presidential hopeful. If their economic mismanagement and zealotry, respectively, reduce the turnout, so much the better. For Mr Khamenei, the elected institutions should be subject to the theocratic power of his wilayat al-faqih, or rule of the jurist.
Harder to secure will be any popular mandate for Mojtaba’s assumption of power. Such is the disaffection with the regime that many Iranians cheered their president’s demise. “Exit pursued by bear,” a wag with a knowledge of Shakespeare posted online, hoping wild animals would find him before the emergency teams did.
Perhaps the most obvious trajectory for Iran now is that a new president is installed who is loyal to the military hardliners who underwrite the regime, and that Mojtaba Khamenei succeeds his father as the supreme leader. Without popular support or a powerful internal constituency of his own, Mojtaba would be beholden to those hardliners. Isolated from global markets, the regime and the economy it controls would continue to decay. Mounting popular dissatisfaction and internal struggles for power could make Iran more repressive and belligerent, with alarming consequences for its citizens and neighbours.
There is, however, another path. Perhaps Mojtaba could set Iran’s modernisation in motion. The 55-year-old scion, says a former official who knows him well, is captivated by the model of Muhammad bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince. Like him, he might relax Iran’s religious rules, release political prisoners and seek a new relationship with America and perhaps even Israel. Were this their reward, he says, most Iranians would accept his succession.
It is an alluring idea, but, unlike Saudi Arabia, Iran has experienced over a century of struggle against dictatorship. As the shah, an earlier secular modernising autocrat, learnt to his peril in 1979, absolute rule of a country as complex as Iran can be any supreme leader’s undoing. ■
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