Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi was confirmed dead by state media on Monday morning, after a helicopter he was traveling in alongside Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, and seven others crashed in foggy conditions in the country’s remote northwest on Sunday.
Iran’s chief of staff of the Armed Forces, Mohammad Bagheri, has ordered an investigation into the cause of the helicopter crash that killed President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian, Tasnim news agency said.
A high-ranking delegation, headed by a military commander and including technical experts, will go to the crash site in Eastern Azerbaijan, Tasnim said.
The helicopter crashed in a remote mountainous region in northwestern Iran on Sunday, killing Raisi, his foreign minister and seven others.
The upcoming, early election to replace Ebrahim Raisi as president could be a “watershed moment for Iran” if the country’s supreme leader allows a range of candidates to stand, rumored.
“I would argue that the most consequential immediate impact of his death is who will come in his wake,”
“That election can be a watershed moment for Iran,” he said.
Shabani conceded that Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei “is more inclined towards conservative rule than to open up the political space.”
But he said Khamenei “has always emphasized voter turnout as a litmus test of the legitimacy of the system.”
Raisi became president of Iran in June 2021 after winning a historically uncompetitive presidential election. Many reform-minded Iranians had refused to take part in an election widely seen as a foregone conclusion, and turnout slumped below 50%.
Khamenei “has now… a golden opportunity to, in a face-saving way, reverse course” by allowing competitive elections and encouraging turnout, Shabani said.
