Helicopter crash comes as Iran already faces huge challenges
The Iranian helicopter crashcomes at a time when the country, faced by unprecedented external challenges, was already bracing itself for a change in regime with the expected demise in the next few years of its 85-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
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, that is ultimately decisive.
Indeed, 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 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 which turnout for some of the elections fell below 10%, and was overall presented as reaching a nationwide turnout of only41% – 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 ultra-conservative group known as Paydari or the Steadfastness Front.
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
MM as it faces western challenges over its nuclear program, 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 and predictability.
His most likely successor is his deputy Ali Bagheri, but hard-liners may regard him as too willing to negotiate with the west over Iran’s nuclear program.
Although Iran has not lost a president in office since the revolution in 1979, the country has a clear formal system for succession in which the first vice president
– currently Mohammad Mokhber
– takes charge.
Few regard Mokhber, a banker and former deputy governor of the Khuzestan province, as presidential material.
A new president should be elected within 50 days,
giving the supreme leader and his entourage relatively little time to select someone that will not only become president at such a critical time, but also someone that will be in a strong position to be his own successor.
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