On June 18, the Islamic Republic of Iran elected a new president, Ebrahim Raisi. Who is Raisi, how did he win the election, and what are his likely political priorities as president?
Sixty-year-old Raisi is a native of Mashhad, in northeastern Iran, where life, physically and spiritually, revolves around the Astan Quds Razavi shrine and charitable foundation, one of the major religious and economic actors in Iran. Raisi himself led this powerful institution between 2016 and 2019. But his origins were humble. Born into a clerical family and orphaned at age five, Raisi pursued theological studies, first in Mashhad and beginning in 1975 at the Theological Seminary in Qom, the other major center of Shia learning in Iran.
He was no radical in his early teens: On his website, Raisi admits he became political in January 1978, just a year prior to the victory of the revolution. He further acknowledges his “revolutionary struggle” was limited to “participation in sit-down strikes” at Tehran University in the months leading up to the collapse of the monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
Even after the victory of the revolution in February 1979, Raisi’s political career started slow: Unlike his peers, who immediately rose to high offices in the new regime through revolutionary zeal and connections, Raisi didn’t receive his first official position until February 19, 1981, when he was appointed attorney general in the Tehran suburb of Karaj. Raisi continued his bureaucratic career in Iran’s justice administration, and in 1988 he served among a four-member committee administering the executions of up to 3,800 political prisoners. The prisoners had received prison sentences, but the regime wanted to cleanse the prison systems by the end of the war with Iraq and ordered the mass killing. This darker “banality of evil” side of Raisi’s career only became public knowledge in August 2016 when a secret 1988 tape recording of the committee’s meeting with Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri was leaked. Montazeri, then Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s successor designate, and fierce critic of the executions, warned the committee members would go down in history as “criminals.”
Raisi’s work for the regime was rewarded in the 1990s, when he was promoted to top positions at the Supreme Audit Court, Judiciary, and Special Clerical Court (Iran’s equivalent of the “Holy Inquisition”). In 2006, he was elected into the Assembly of Experts (which elects the supreme leader) and then reelected in 2016. Also in 2016, Raisi was appointed director of the Astan Quds Razavi shrine and charitable foundation.
While the trajectory of Raisi’s bureaucratic career suggested he would attain important positions such as that of Iran’s chief justice, he was challenged in electoral politics. Introverted, guarded, and lacking charisma, Raisi is not a natural leader, and he turned elsewhere to engineer an election victory.
Following his unsuccessful challenge of incumbent President Hassan Rouhani in the May 2017 presidential election, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei appointed Raisi chief justice, a position he used in his selective fight against corruption prosecuting his political opponents, including Rouhani’s brother, close relatives of Rouhani’s Cabinet ministers, and economic rivals of the economic empire of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
Reciprocating Raisi’s services, the IRGC orchestrated bread riots in Mashhad in December 2017 to weaken Rouhani, but instead anti-Rouhani protesters soon hurled insults at the IRGC’s military engagement in Syria, Khamenei, and the regime in its entirety.
In a better calculated move, Khamenei engineered the recent presidential election so Raisi would not face any real competition. He did so by dissuading Hassan Khomeini, grandson of the founder of the Islamic Republic, from running for president and through the Guardian Council’s barring of most of the 592 presidential hopefuls who registered as candidates. Only seven candidates passed the needle eye of the Guardian Council, but, just to be on the safe side and avoid splitting the vote, three of the seven approved candidates withdrew their candidacy a few days prior to the election. In the end, Raisi competed with three other candidates with a common denominator: A poor electoral record.
Many Iranians responded to these maneuverings by boycotting the election: Only 28.9 million Iranians, just 48.8% of Iran’s 59.3 million eligible voters, participated in the election, which marks the lowest voter turnout since 1979. Still more remarkable, 3.7 million cast votes were invalid, many likely from public servants in need of a voting stamp on their government ID, with candidates written in such as the Mahdi (the Shia Messiah), the singer Googoosh, or other individuals as an expression of protest. Raisi won the race with nearly 62% of the votes. Other candidates gained fewer votes than those marked invalid.
As president, Raisi will face the same challenges as his predecessor. Chief among them is the United States’ sanctions regime, which prevents Iran from realizing its economic potential. And a restive population, either seeking bread or freedom, is ready to take their protest to the streets or even rebel against the regime.
Remarkably, Rouhani and his technocratic government are likely to help Raisi deal with both issues: It is quite possible that the Rouhani government will reach an agreement with the United States to return to the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action nuclear deal prior to the August presidential inauguration in Iran. In doing so, Raisi will not be blamed for the Rouhani government’s concessions to the United States. Should the United States return to the JCPOA and lift some sanctions against Iran, Raisi will take credit for the improved economy in absence of those sanctions.
Apart from the prospects for improved economic conditions, Raisi will also face choices such as how to distribute that bread and freedom. To judge by his election promises, he is likely to continue and perhaps expand former President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s populist basic income scheme, which proved extremely popular among low-income groups. Raisi won’t liberalize the political system, quite the contrary. But he may surprise most observers by reducing restrictions on personal freedoms and the repression of women, both of which cause constant tensions between the state and the citizenry. Reducing harassment of women and youth for things such as immodest attire may endear him to the majority of Iranians who boycotted the election or cast invalid votes. This will be of some importance to the next presidential election.
Perhaps more important than the presidency is the succession after Khamenei. Long rumored to be Khamenei and the IRGC’s favorite for the next supreme leader, Raisi will use the presidency as a steppingstone. The country may therefore have gotten a new president and a supreme leader in waiting with Raisi’s engineered electoral victory.
