Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdollahian lost their lives in a plane crash on April 19 while returning in a helicopter from the inauguration of a dam on the border with Azerbaijan. On board with them, in addition to the three crew members, were the governor of Iran’s East Azerbaijan province Malek Rahmati, the hojjatoleslam of the Tabriz Mosque Mohammad Ali Al-Hashemi, IRGC General Mehdi Mousavi, and two of the president’s bodyguards.
While investigations are ongoing to ascertain the causes of the incident, which have quite a few obscure points, the management of the government’s current affairs has been taken over under the provisions of Article 131 of the constitution by First Vice President Mohammad Mokhber, Speaker of Parliament Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, and the head of the judiciary, Hojjatoleslam Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Eje’i.
Instead, Ali Bagheri Kani, former chief negotiator of the nuclear deal and career diplomat, was appointed to the interim post of foreign minister, who will manage the Islamic Republic’s foreign policy until the date of the new elections, set for June 28.
President Raisi’s death has raised numerous questions regarding Iran’s future domestic and foreign policy directions, as well as in the complex issue related to the future succession to the Supreme Leader, for which the president was considered a possible candidate.
The figure of the president, however, as important as he is in the institutional framework, is not endowed with such broad powers as to be able to independently determine the country’s overall strategic orientations, fitting on the contrary within a complex decision-making system composed of different bodies that operate according to a collegial criterion of defining the country’s political orientations and major strategic decisions. A system, moreover, presided over at the top by the Supreme Leader, the “rahbar,” who is formally the ultimate decision maker in Iranian policy but who again does not act independently, having to generate a shared consensus within an extremely polarized and factional political system.
The Western vulgate that every decision in Iran is made by the Supreme Leader is quite erroneous, based on a stereotype connected to the figure of the country’s first Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruollah Khomeini, who was at the top of an institutional system that nevertheless changed profoundly over the course of the Islamic Republic’s forty-five years of existence.
In this context then comes the element of generational transition of political power, where the first generation composed by the founders of the Islamic Republic, mostly from clerical backgrounds, has now been pervasively succeeded by a second generation, largely coming from the combined political, economic, and military power of the Pasdaran. Two generations with often very different ideological positions and strategic views, as demonstrated even in recent times by the handling of both the crisis with Israel and the debate over the possible military development of Iran’s nuclear program.
The second generation is now dominant in numbers over the first, occupying the main positions of power within every public institution and especially in the economic and defense sectors, although within a system still formally dominated by the role of the previous generation, which nevertheless increasingly has to compromise with the other side, accepting the terms of a now profound change of direction.
This prevalence of the role of second-generation members is clearly visible within the political context, where within the vast and dominant cadre of formations of conservative extraction, the weight of the ultra-radical factions, expressed mostly by the second generation, now outweighs the positions of the traditionalists, or principalists, who in contrast represent the ideological positions of the first generation.
In this complex and often conflicting dimension of power, the broad outlines of Iran’s strategic vision have long since been defined, well before the very election of Ebrahim Raisi to the office of president, and are oriented firmly in the groove of the vision expressed by the second generation, which, compared to the first, is characterized by a far more assertive and less pragmatic approach to the traditional posture of local politics.
President Raisi’s death, therefore, does not change the overall scenario of Iranian politics, but rather offers the second generation the opportunity to now also win the last elective institutional office over which they did not exercise direct control, thus formalizing the completion of the long generational transition that brought them to the top of Iranian institutions and to the center of the decision-making system.
