First: an accident or an attack? There is little reason to believe that the crash of the helicopter where the president, the foreign minister and a few other Iranian officials died on Sunday could have been the result of an attack… did you say: Israeli?
The accident theory, with the local topography and the weather on the Iran-Azerbaijan border on Saturday evening, is completely plausible. An extreme act of war like the assassination of an enemy president would push the limits of self-destructive madness. Did we not see Israel and Iran, in their brief confrontation in April, holding back and refusing to go to extremes?
Who was Ebrahim Raïssi, what did he represent? In Iran, the elected president has long been a (relative) counterweight to the power of clerics.
Ayatollah Khomeini’s Iran was originally a two-legged institutional system, one by divine right (Council of Discernment, Supreme Guide) and the other elected (president, legislative assembly)… The control of the mullahs and the Supreme Guide was restrained, if only partially, by an elected political staff, accountable for its decisions to the population.
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Certain consultations in Iran allowed the arrival of reformist or liberal figures. We think of President Mohammad Khatami (1993-2001), once the darling of the Western media. And, to a lesser extent, to Hassan Rouhani (2013-2021).
Perhaps by accident, genuine reformists have periodically slipped among the candidates. Islamist Iran was — surprise — a country where votes were counted honestly. Until…
In 2009, universal suffrage almost gave birth to a reformist president who became a revolutionary, during a historic electoral campaign: Mir-Hossein Moussavi, carried in spite of himself by the “green wave” of young people and intellectuals who vomited up the regime of mullahs.
The result, on the evening of this dramatic June 14, 2009: massive fraud and “invented” results in favor of the outgoing, the ultraconservative Ahmadinejad… and a bloody repression of demonstrators, during the following weeks.
Interestingly, the 2013 election partially returned to earlier semi-liberalism, with the election of Rouhani. He pushed for a reduction in the rules imposed on women, tolerance in the face of criticism from the press and internationally for a less intransigent attitude towards “imperialism” and “Zionism”.
Hassan Rouhani had favored, against his own radicals, the nuclear agreement signed in 2015, arguing that international flexibility, the acceptance of constraints and controls would have beneficial effects internally (lifting of sanctions ).
But this agreement was torn up by a certain Donald Trump in 2018, under pressure from his Israeli friends. Regular sabotage of a timid inflection which was beginning and will never have come to fruition.
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This two-legged political Iran, 50% or 25% democratic, no longer exists today. Raïssi, a religious fundamentalist, was a supporter of excessive repression, of the return in force of the “moral police”, of the accelerated relaunch of the nuclear program.
He is also the man of rapprochement with Russia and China – the internal dictatorship going hand in hand with geopolitical developments and international alliances. The “convergence of struggles”, in Sino-Russian-Iranian fashion, with a North Korean touch.
The election of Raïssi, in 2021, was completely arranged. The filtering of candidates no longer allowed the slightest reformist to pass. As for the vote count, it no longer matters whether it was mechanically rigged or not… since everything is now decided at the level of “filtered” applications. Iranian semi-democracy had become a real dictatorship, dressed in bogus votes.
Iranians will also remember him as the “judge of the gallows”, who, as a young prosecutor of the Islamic Republic in the 1980s, sent thousands of political prisoners to their deaths. Also, his erratic management of the economy, which saw the national currency collapse and prices soar, in a context of great international tension.
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Can his death destabilize the system? Despite the apparent unity of a regime which has today purged all its liberal elements, despite the fact that the president has become a simple executioner of the Supreme Guide… there are still clans vying for power. Between religious fundamentalists and the Revolutionary Guards, more interested in economic predation than dogma. Between supporters of excessive repression, and those who advocate a more measured approach.
More important than the identity of Raisi’s successor, the succession of the Supreme Guide (Ali Khamenei, 85 years old, ill) is another potential subject of discord, in a country in deep economic crisis, where a significant fraction, if not the majority, of the population is hostile to the regime.
There is the economy, but also the religious side, increasingly rejected, particularly by women who can no longer bear the veiled suffocation. We remember Mahsa Amini, arrested in September 2022 for incorrectly wearing the Islamic veil, and died at the hands of the “morality police”. There followed months of demonstrations by men and women, and something like 500 deaths in the repressions — led by Raïssi.
In Iran, anti-regime uprisings come in waves: 2009, 2015, 2019, 2022. Waves launched by rigged elections, the rise in gasoline or food prices, the shamed Islamic veil…
Could it be that the death of the president, who more or less secretly rejoices people who are pouring their hearts out today on social networks and angrily refusing official mourning… provokes a new one?
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