Iran’s President, Ebrahim Raisi, has died in a helicopter crash on his return from opening a dam in neighbouring Azerbaijan.
Raisi had long been rumoured to be a successor to the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Khamenei.
In the interim, the country’s vice president Mohammad Mokhber, will take over as president.
Elections to come
Mokhber’s first job will be to call an election within 50 days of Raisi’s death, an election which had been planned for 2025.
Whilst Ayatollah Khamenei is the supreme leader and therefore the arbiter of final decision making, the president serves as the head of the country’s exec branch.
The election will come at a tricky time for the regime, with the country in a state of heightened tension with Israel and with a restive young population, particularly in urban areas.
Arash Azizi, a political analyst at the Center for Middle East and Global Order, told The Atlantic that it was highly likely a “power struggle” was already underway.
Unpopular regime?
The last election in Iran saw the lowest turnout in the Iranian Republic’s history, shy of 50 per cent, along with a record number of blank or spoilt ballots.
That came despite Ayatollah Khamenei declaring both acts ‘haram’ – forbidden.
Since the election there have been further protests against what many – particularly young Iranians – see as an increasingly restrictive regime.
Protests spread across the world
The women life freedom protests – which began in 2022 after the death of Mahsa Amini whilst in custody of the country’s strict morality police – embarrassed the regime on a global scale.
The protests spread across Iran, with many women refusing to comply with religious police instruction.
Hardliners like Raisi led the crackdown on those and other expressions of dissent against the regime.
Who could be next?
Raisi was tipped as eventually taking the job of supreme leader – only men are able to take the role.
With his death, some analysts are suggesting that Khamanei’s son Mojtaba could be next in line instead – but he would need to be popular enough with the public to win an election, even one as controlled as an Iranian election.
Iran doesn’t seem like a country in which presidents die by accident. But it also is a country in which aircraft crash, due to the sorry state of infrastructure in the internationally isolated Islamic Republic.
Analyst Arash Azizi
What are markets doing?
As ever, in moments of uncertainty, gold shot up to a record overnight.
In large part that was due to confusion about whether Raisi was dead, and whether there was any possibility that another power could have been involved.
Iranian state TV – which is closely linked to the regime – appear to have nipped that speculation in the bed, showing regular images of the fog and bad weather at the crash site.
One thing is for certain: the death of Raisi, known as the ‘butcher of Tehran’, will create further uncertainty in a region that is not short of it already.