Ebrahim Raisi was no moderate, but his death may mean Iran becomes even more hardline | Lina Khatib

The death of the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, in a helicopter crash on Sunday night immediately set off speculation about the succession of the next supreme leader. Raisi was widely considered to be a leading candidate to replace Ali Khamenei, who is in his mid-80s and reportedly in poor health. His departure from the pool of possible candidates has raised the question of whether this could be an opportunity for the Iranian regime to widen political participation in the country by reinstating moderates and reformist figures into some state functions.

At the highest levels, the Iranian regime is run by hardliners. Policy and strategy are made by the hardline supreme leader. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the elite military entity executing Iranian foreign policy and military interventions across the Middle East and beyond, reports to him. There is no clear separation between clerical and military functions.

Reformists have been permitted to inhabit the softer components of state bureaucracy in administrative rather than decision-making roles, but even this presence has dwindled over the years. If the hardliners judge that Iran would benefit from projecting a reformist image to the wider world, reformist figures are allowed to emerge in senior public roles. This is what happened with the election of Hassan Rouhani as president in 2013, coinciding with negotiations over the nuclear deal.

Hardliners are able to steer the election process because no candidate is allowed to run in a presidential or parliamentary election without prior approval by the Guardian Council, which is appointed by the supreme leader.

As Khamenei approached his 80s, he began shifting the Iranian regime to become increasingly insular. Khamenei is concerned about succession and wants to ensure that he is replaced by someone who will carry on the same policy and strategy. Every cycle of selecting members of the Assembly of Experts, the deliberative body that selects the supreme leader and over which Khamenei exerts significant influence, has brought in an increasingly hardening core of Khamenei loyalists.

The US withdrawal from the nuclear deal in 2018 and its assassination of the IRGC senior commander Qasem Soleimani in 2020 only confirmed to Khamenei that the survival of the regime depended on weeding out divergence and on projecting an image of defiance to a west that cannot be trusted. This is why he tasked Raisi with crushing the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in 2022, and why in the last parliamentary elections in March 2024, hardliners won the majority of seats.