The death of President Ebrahim Raisi in a helicopter crash in May 2024 upended the political status quo in Iran and created new uncertainty about where the country is headed. In many ways, Raisi was at the center of the Iranian political establishment. He was a loyal protege of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, who spent years elevating Raisi and helping build his profile in the regime. By the time that Raisi died, he had become one of the leading hardline figures and was widely considered a top contender to succeed Khamenei as the nation’s “Supreme Leader.” Virtually every power center in Iran expected Raisi to remain a driving force in the regime for years, if not decades, to come. His sudden death disrupted those plans and has triggered an impromptu reshaping of the Iranian political landscape.
In this context, the relative moderate Masoud Pezeshkian won the Iranian presidential election in June 2024, marking a dramatic shift away from the years-long trend of expanding hardliner control across the regime. Khamenei had orchestrated a regime purification project meant to “Islamize” the Iranian state since 2019. In practice, this project resulted in empowering hardline ideologues and personal loyalists, including Raisi, while marginalizing the relative moderates. The chances that the moderates would meaningfully reenter the political arena any time soon thus appeared extremely low before Raisi died. That Khamenei, who ultimately controls Iranian elections, allowed Pezeshkian to become president raises new questions about Khamenei’s thinking and the political trajectory of Iran. The regime will almost certainly retain its core revolutionary and theocratic character and strategic orientation against the United States. But the post-Raisi period of Iranian politics will also likely feature renewed negotiations and possibly intense infighting among regime elite in order to influence the future direction of Iran.
This paper aims to address some of the uncertainty generated amid Raisi’s death by examining the political context in which he died and how the rise of Pezeshkian fits into Khamenei’s goal of preserving the Islamic Republic, its revolutionary ideology, and his own legacy.
Raisi to Pezeshkian
The death of Raisi derailed Khamenei’s years-long effort to prepare for his own death and to ensure that the regime would retain his revolutionary principles. Khamenei began to pursue this effort in 2019 after he concluded that the Iranian state and people needed to recommit themselves to the founding ideas of the Iranian revolution.1 Khamenei asserted that Iran was at a critical juncture on the path to establishing a multinational Islamic civilization, which he says is the ultimate goal of the revolution.2 His argument proceeded that Iran must re-ideologize to ensure that it remains on this path. Khamenei presented this vision in February 2019, as the regime observed the 40th anniversary of the revolution. Khamenei published a manifesto titled the “Second Phase of the Islamic Revolution,” in which he stressed the need to cultivate a new generation of Iranian revolutionaries who would lead and manage the regime in the decades ahead.3 He stressed that the regime urgently needed to instill the revolution’s ideological zeal in Iranian youth. The regime under Khamenei would later promote the narrative that the dire economic conditions in Iran were a trial for the youth to overcome in the same way that the first generation of revolutionaries had withstood the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s.4
Khamenei was responding at least partly to mounting popular unrest across the country, especially among Iranian youth. Disaffected citizens had taken to the streets repeatedly in 2017 and 2018 to decry corruption, high unemployment, inflation, poor public service provision, and the spending of state resources on proxy and partner militias across the Middle East when those resources could have been used to improve the domestic situation.5 The unrest quickly spread to encompass other popular grievances, including ecological, humanitarian, political, religious, and social concerns.6 Wide swaths of the Iranian population participated in these demonstrations, including disenfranchised minorities, laborers, merchants, and students.7 Protester rhetoric frequently evolved from domestic complaints into full-blown rejections of the regime and its ideology. Some citizens began describing Iranian authorities as their enemies, while others fondly remembered the Iranian government under the shah.8 This discontent culminated in large-scale protests across Iran from December 2017 to January 2018.9 This wave of demonstrations became known as the “Dey” protests after the Persian calendar month in which they occurred. These protests spread across urban and rural areas and thus strained the energy and resources of the Iranian security forces that were trying to crack down.10 This challenge was especially threatening to the regime because one of the principal vulnerabilities of its security apparatus is that it does not have the personnel to easily manage widespread protests across the country.11
Khamenei understood this crisis through the lens of his decades-long struggle against the United States. He has long accused Washington of waging a hybrid war against Iran in order to undermine regime legitimacy and stoke civil conflict.12 Khamenei and his underlings have claimed that Western agents agitate and organize protest activity to these ends.13 The regime under Khamenei has thus treated social unrest, which has largely been driven by economic and social grievances, as an ideological-political problem that warrants an ideological-political solution.
Khamenei concluded that, as part of the Second Step vision, he needed to introduce a new generation of revolutionaries into the bureaucracy and wage a propaganda campaign to indoctrinate the population. This project involved installing extreme hardliners into senior and mid-tier positions while sidelining officials deemed to be too liberal or sympathetic to the West. This included then-President Hassan Rouhani and his allies, who argued for increasing economic engagement with the West in order to improve domestic conditions. Khamenei seemed to conclude that the Western-focused and misguided policies of Rouhani and other moderates had engendered much of the corruption and mismanagement in the state bureaucracy and that empowering a new cohort of ideological technocrats would improve Iranian governance. Khamenei framed this undertaking in the context of his long-term ambition of forging an Islamic civilization, asserting that Iran must first establish a fully Islamic state and society.14
Khamenei’s “Islamization” project and Raisi’s role
Khamenei turned to Raisi to begin implementing the Islamization and purification project in early 2019. Raisi had spent most of his career up to that point as a judge, playing a prominent role in the suppression of political dissent. Raisi was especially notorious for his role in the “death committee” which played a prominent role in the execution of thousands of political prisoners in the 1988 massacre.15 Khamenei appointed Raisi as chief of the judiciary in March 2019—one month after publishing the Second Step manifesto.16 Khamenei, in issuing the appointment, commanded Raisi to facilitate the Second Step and “transform” the judiciary.17 Khamenei also emphasized the need to hire “righteous and revolutionary and virtuous youth,” highlighting his desire to inject a new cadre of ideologues into the system.18 Raisi was 58 years old at the time and of the younger generation that Khamenei sought to elevate. Raisi replaced then-judiciary chief Sadegh Amoli Larijani, who represented a less extreme branch of the hardliners and was the brother of the moderate parliament speaker at the time, Ali Larijani. Sadegh Amoli Larijani is also a prominent and influential cleric, whom some considered a possible candidate for supreme leadership and therefore a potential rival to Raisi.
Raisi spent his time as judiciary chief targeting his political opponents. Raisi almost immediately oversaw the arrest of one of Sadegh Amoli Larijani’s top deputies.19 The judiciary under Raisi similarly convicted Rouhani’s brother and the son-in-law of Rouhani’s labor minister on separate corruption charges, resulting in prison sentences for both.20 Becoming judiciary chief gave Raisi influence over economic and security policies as well, which he used to further undermine his opponents. The judiciary chief is an ex officio member of several senior policy bodies, such as the Supreme Economic Coordination Council and Supreme National Security Council, alongside the president and parliamentary speaker. On at least one occasion, Raisi used this influence to block Rouhani from selling oil bonds domestically to address economic challenges.21
The next step in Khamenei’s purification project was to enable the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) to play a more influential role in elections. Khamenei appointed the top IRGC commander, Major General Mohammad Ali Jafari, to head the newly established IRGC Baghiyatollah Cultural and Social Headquarters in April 2019, one month after making Raisi the head of the judiciary.22 Khamenei instructed Jafari, like Raisi, to advance the Second Step by leveraging “religious scholars and cultural elites and jihadi and revolutionary youth.”23 Though Jafari’s appointment seemed like a demotion since he went from leading the whole IRGC to commanding one of its headquarters, Jafari was now responsible for what Khamenei viewed to be an extremely sensitive undertaking: The Baghiyatollah headquarters began functioning similar to the Quds Force in that it is formally subordinate to the overall IRGC commander but, in reality, reports directly to the Office of the Supreme Leader.24 Jafari in this new role assumed command of IRGC efforts to organize and mobilize regime loyalists across Iran in order to help build an Islamic society and state. Islamizing Iranian society has involved the Baghiyatollah headquarters hosting cultural programs and disseminating propaganda while extrajudicially enforcing regime behavioral expectations, such as harassing women to adhere to the hijab requirement.25 Islamizing the Iranian state has involved the Baghiyatollah headquarters activating its networks among the population to help hardliners win elections.26 These networks of regime loyalists do so by intimidating voters, mobilizing regime supporters, and manipulating in-person ballots.27
Khamenei next gave hardliners control of parliament, which moderates controlled at the time. Khamenei, via the Guardian Council, engineered the legislative elections in February 2020 to ensure that hardliners won the most seats. The Guardian Council, which Khamenei controls, is constitutionally responsible for vetting and approving all electoral candidates. The council disqualified an abnormally high number of moderates and reformists from running, differentially citing corruption (which is endemic in the regime) and a lack of commitment to the Islamic Republic (which is an entirely subjective criterion).28 The new hardliner-dominated legislature selected one of their own, Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, as parliament speaker in May 2020,29 a position he has retained ever since. Ghalibaf is a former IRGC commander who has a long resume of supporting brutal repression. Ghalibaf was a political ally of Raisi, having endorsed him in the 2017 and 2021 presidential elections.30
Khamenei completed the hardliner takeover when he intervened in the June 2021 presidential election in order to guarantee that Raisi won. The Guardian Council cultivated a field of candidates that advantaged Raisi while feigning political diversity. The council disqualified several prominent moderates and reformists, including Ali Larijani.31 These disqualifications left Raisi in a field comprising mostly hardliners. The election concluded in a landslide victory for Raisi, who won around 72 percent of the vote, according to regime statistics.32 Raisi furthered the Islamization of the Iranian state by populating his administration with hardline ideologues and IRGC general officers. Raisi, in the hiring process, drew from the alumni network of Imam Sadegh University, which is known for producing a deeply zealous breed of civil servant.33 Raisi also hired prominent IRGC commanders with long histories of expanding IRGC control of the economy and supporting crackdowns on social unrest.34
Raisi’s ascension to the presidency left a vacancy in the judiciary chief position, which Khamenei filled with another hardliner cleric, Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejei.35 Ejei already had at that point an extensive background supporting authoritarian policies and oppression, especially during his previous tenure as intelligence minister under President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.36 Ejei is particularly known for his roles in the arrest, torture, and execution of political dissidents. Ejei received his clerical education under Mohammad Taghi Mesbah Yazdi, who was infamously recognized as one of the most radical hardline clerics in Iran before he died in January 2021.37
Khamenei’s purification project thus seemed complete once Raisi took the presidency in August 2021. Khamenei had expunged moderates from most positions of influence and empowered a cadre of hardliners whom he trusted to preserve his legacy and help the regime reach its Islamic state, society, and ultimately civilization. Many external and internal observers expected that hardliner influence in Iran would continue to expand and ossify. This trajectory seemed especially likely given that Raisi was widely discussed as a leading candidate to become the next supreme leader, though it remains unclear whether Khamenei ever truly wanted Raisi to succeed him.
The death of Raisi in May 2024 suddenly disrupted this trajectory after Khamenei had invested so much energy and time into his purification project. It forced Khamenei and other power centers in Iran to begin reconsidering how they would prepare for supreme leader succession and what path the Islamic Republic should follow. It is unclear whether Khamenei has yet reached a firm decision on how to resolve this uncertainty. He could still be reeling from the death of his mentee and is almost certainly distracted by the Israel-Hamas war and its expansion across the Middle East.
Enter Pezeshkian
Khamenei allowed Pezeshkian to become president in this context. That Khamenei allowed a moderate politician to rise to power seems to contradict the purification project. But Khamenei likely sees Pezeshkian as another loyal pawn who will help stabilize the regime and preserve his legacy—which were the core motivations behind the purification project in the first instance.
Khamenei has likely supported Pezeshkian because of the expectation that Pezeshkian will be a weak president who faithfully executes Khamenei’s vision without challenging the supreme leader. Pezeshkian has emphasized repeatedly in recent months that he considers himself a loyal servant to the supreme leader and an executor of his will.38 Pezeshkian responded to his election victory by publicly praising Khamenei, saying “if it was not for [Khamenei], I do not think my name would have easily come out the [ballot] boxes.”39 Pezeshkian, when preparing his cabinet nominations, coordinated closely with the Office of the Supreme Leader and sought Khamenei’s endorsement before sending the nominees to Parliament for formal approval. He boasted of this coordination throughout the process and as he presented his nominees to parliament.40 That coordination led to Parliament approving all of the nominees in the first round of voting, which was the first time that had happened in Iran since 2001.41
Pezeshkian’s eager self-subordination to Khamenei marks a departure from recent presidents in Iran. Although Khamenei has been the ultimate political authority in Iran ever since becoming supreme leader in 1989, he has historically had to contend with strong and assertive personalities in the presidency. Every Iranian president from 1989 to 2021 feuded with Khamenei at some point during their tenure—some more often than others. Most presidents, in fact, ended their terms in office on overtly poor terms with Khamenei. Raisi broke this pattern when he became president, appearing consistently deferent to Khamenei and at no point openly challenging him. Pezeshkian appears to mark a continuation of this new trend in which the president functions more like the manager of the council of ministers rather than the head of state. That, in turn, cedes further personal control of the administration to Khamenei.
Khamenei also appears to calculate that Pezeshkian could solve the political and economic crises plaguing the Islamic Republic. Anti-regime unrest has expanded and become more violent since the 2017–18 Dey protests. This unrest peaked most recently in late 2022 with the Mahsa Amini movement, which demonstrated unprecedented coordination and organization among protesters and violence toward Iranian authorities.42 Protesters killed over 70 security officers in clashes across Iran during the Mahsa Amini movement, while only one officer died in the Dey protests.43 The Mahsa Amini movement severely strained the internal security apparatus and threatened regime control over parts of the country in several instances.44 Separately, the Iranian economy has rebounded slightly in recent years but remains afflicted by high inflation, rampant corruption, and a weak private sector.45 Meanwhile, the sidelining of moderates and reformists within politics had turned them into a quasi-opposition faction that was incentivized to amplify the hardliner-run government’s shortcomings among the already disaffected public. Khamenei likely saw these crises taken cumulatively as an enduring threat that he needed to address urgently before his death.
The election of Pezeshkian has at least ostensibly brought some moderates and reformists back into the political fold without reversing the progress of the purification project. The Pezeshkian administration is headed by prominent moderates, including former foreign minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, but has hardliners and Khamenei loyalists in key posts. Pezeshkian kept Raisi’s ministers for culture, intelligence, and justice as well as the Raisi-appointed secretary of the Supreme National Security Council and director of the Atomic Energy Organization, which manages the Iranian nuclear program.46 Khamenei required Pezeshkian to keep at least some of these Raisi-era holdovers.47 Khamenei also appeared to retain his usual role in personally approving the ministers for defense, foreign affairs, and the interior.48 This involvement by Khamenei reflects his desire to have hardliners (alongside himself) maintain direct control over cultural indoctrination, propaganda, and state security. Khamenei conversely allowed Pezeshkian to appoint moderates and reformists to the positions most involved in economic policy, infrastructure, and social services. Pezeshkian has branded his administration as the “national unity” government in order to reflect its relatively diverse political composition.49
Khamenei likely hopes for the reintegration of some moderates and reformists to assuage some popular frustration. Khamenei privately favored Pezeshkian during the presidential election, according to Reuters, with the hope that Pezeshkian would drive high electoral participation and thereby highlight growing public confidence in the regime.50 Iran had experienced record low voter turnout in the 2020 and 2024 legislative elections and 2021 presidential election, underlining the mounting public disillusionment with the regime.51 Iranian leaders had long prided themselves on high public participation in their elections, so the abrupt decline in recent years represented a serious blow to their credibility.
Khamenei likely also calculates that Pezeshkian could revive a nuclear agreement with the West. Pezeshkian ran for president largely on the platform that he would try to secure a deal in order to get relief from international sanctions and attract foreign investment.52 Pezeshkian has assembled a team of diplomats with deep experience in negotiations with the West, including Zarif and Abbas Araghchi, to this end.53 Pezeshkian has also begun pushing for regime compliance with international money laundering and financial transparency standards to further open the Iranian economy to international business.54 Khamenei has expressed openness to such reengagement, particularly nuclear negotiations, on several occasions in recent months, including in meetings with Pezeshkian and his cabinet.55 Khamenei’s sudden emphasis may reflect dissatisfaction with the benefits yielded from Raisi’s earlier efforts to build economic partnerships with China and Russia. However, it remains unclear on what terms Khamenei would accept a deal with the West—despite his recent rhetoric in support of reengagement.
General Trajectories for Iran
The current political arrangement in Iran will likely persist until the 85-year-old Khamenei dies. In this scenario, hardliners will remain the most dominant influence in the regime, while Pezeshkian and his circle will lobby for their more pragmatic agenda. These sides will debate and fight, and Khamenei will adjudicate when needed, much in the same way that he has historically. This equilibrium will only last in its current form until Khamenei dies, however. The absence of Raisi or any other designated successor to the supreme leader and the reintegration of some moderates into the political establishment will matter most in this context.
It is too soon to forecast which specific individuals or networks in Iran will gain or lose influence after Khamenei dies. US analysts and policymakers should focus instead on understanding which general policy trends will come to control Iranian decision-making. There are currently three general policy trends that should be considered: hardliners, moderates, and reformists. This article refers to these groups as policy trends rather than “factions” or “movements” in order to avoid ascribing coherence and organization to them. These groups are instead fractured and characterized by intense rivalries. Many Iranian politicians, moreover, do not fit neatly into any single policy trend.
This framework nevertheless helps capture the different political philosophies that are prevalent in regime discourse. The hardliner school of thought tends to support the regime’s most extreme domestic and foreign positions, such as authoritarian and autarkic policies at home and aggressive expansionism across the Middle East. Moderates tend to be more pragmatic ideologues, who are prepared to adopt more tempered positions, such as pursuing a nuclear deal with the West, if doing so will help keep the regime stable and in power. True reformists are the most critical of Iranian domestic and foreign policy and advocate for far-reaching economic, political, and social reform to better represent public preferences. Pezeshkian does not fit into the reformist camp, given that he has proven to be a loyal supporter of Khamenei and his agenda. After he came to see them as a threat during the 2009 Green Movement, Khamenei banished the true reformists almost completely from the political establishment.
The long-term trajectory of the Islamic Republic will depend on how each policy trend interacts with the others and influences supreme leader succession. Hardliners were positioned, until Raisi died, to control much of the succession process and dominate the regime for the foreseeable future. The rise of Pezeshkian and the simmering unrest across Iran are key variables that could affect the likelihood of this outcome. The following examines the most straightforward paths for each policy trend to become politically dominant in Iran after Khamenei dies.
Hardliner victory
Hardliners still have the most straightforward path to controlling Iranian policy after Khamenei dies. Hardliners will control most levers of power in the regime, crucially the armed forces, clergy, judiciary, parastatal entities, parliament, and state media. For example, the upper echelons of the IRGC are composed of staunch hardliners who have at their disposal the financial resources, military strength, political clout, and propaganda machines of the entire IRGC. All of these tools will be useful in influencing, coercing, and threatening other regime actors after Khamenei dies. Hardliners also control the Assembly of Experts, which is the regime body responsible for selecting the supreme leader, though it is unclear how much this body will matter in reality. Different circles within the hardliner policy trend exist across the aforementioned power centers, of course. They will clash and argue bitterly with one another in trying to influence regime policy and supreme leader succession, which is why it is difficult to forecast which specific individuals will accrue power. Nevertheless, the general dominance of this policy trend across the regime makes it likely that hardliners will heavily influence supreme leader succession. This outcome is dangerous for the United States since hardliners would likely continue to pursue extreme foreign policies, such as expanding support to the so-called “Axis of Resistance,” while increasing oppression and human rights abuses domestically.
Moderate victory
Ambiguity in the Iranian constitution creates a unique opportunity for Pezeshkian and other moderates to play a prominent role in post-Khamenei Iran. The constitution stipulates that, after the supreme leader dies or is otherwise removed from office, the Assembly of Experts should select his successor “within the shortest possible time.”56 The constitution then provides that a council comprised of the president, judiciary chief, and a cleric from the Guardian Council assumes the duties of the supreme leader in the interim period.57 The Expediency Discernment Council, which is an advisory body to the supreme leader, is responsible for selecting which cleric from the Guardian Council joins the leadership council. This council could in theory hold power indefinitely due to the ambiguity in the constitution regarding the timeline in which the next supreme leader must be selected.
If Khamenei were to die now, the leadership council would consist partly of Pezeshkian and current judiciary chief Gholam Hossein Mohseni Ejei, meaning that the council would have one moderate and one hardliner. Former judiciary chief Sadegh Amoli Larijani, who has historically straddled the line between moderates and hardliners, would then influence who the third member of the council is, given that he is chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council. It would be too speculative to say how exactly Sadegh Amoli Larijani would approach this situation, but such circumstances would create an opportunity for the moderates, including his brother, Ali Larijani, to lobby for a political ally to join the leadership council.
Moderate control of the regime would likely lead to more measured domestic and foreign policies while still retaining a commitment to the regime’s core ideology and regional project. That project would still likely involve trying to attain regional hegemony, destroying the Israeli state, and expelling American influence from the Middle East. This outcome would be particularly dangerous if it led to the regime adopting pragmatic policies that help it stabilize itself and elongate its lifespan while furnishing it with more resources.
Reformist victory
The reformists face the most difficult climb to return to political prominence in Iran. They have few ways of influencing the political discourse and lack any institutional power that they could leverage in intra-regime negotiations. One conceivable way by which reformists could gain influence is by coopting the anti-regime protest movement. Reformists could theoretically try siding with aggrieved citizens in calling for full-scale change in the political structure of Iran. It remains far from clear, however, that protesters would accept reformists. And there is no guarantee that cooperation between the reformists and protesters would be productive for either party. Nonetheless, if such a strategy were successful, it could provide the reformists the robust base of support that they currently lack at a meaningful scale. Inciting further protests could then pressure hardliners or moderates to bring reformists into any future political settlement.
Conclusion
Each of the courses of action described here are riddled with uncertainty and potential dangers for the United States. Policymakers should use this framework to understand what possible inflections and flashpoints could affect US interests in the coming years. Simply assuming that hardliners will keep the regime moving in the same direction it has been since 2019 is no longer the safe bet that it was before Raisi died. Ignoring potential alternative trajectories would leave the United States vulnerable to surprises.
Lastly, Western observers should temper any expectations that Pezeshkian will introduce serious reform to Iran. Pezeshkian has made clear that he is a loyal follower of Khamenei, who himself has shown no indications that he will change the core policies that he had pursued for decades.