The second-tier cleric threatening Rouhani’s re-election

Not many in Iran knew of Ebrahim Raisi, 57, a mid-rank cleric, before his name explosively surfaced in the Iranian media last week. Raisi announced his candidacy in the upcoming presidential election scheduled to be held on May 19. Raisi will reportedly run as an independent. However, it is an open secret that he represents the conservatives and the radicals competing against the incumbent, centrist president Hassan Rouhani. The newly formed Popular Front of Islamic Revolutionary Forces (PFIRF), a group said to represent over 75 per cent of the conservatives, has chosen Raisi as their candidate.

In March 2016, Raisi was appointed by Iran’s leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as the custodian of Astan-e Qods-e Razavi, an economic empire responsible for the management of assets belonging to the shrine of the eighth Shiite Imam, Imam Reza. But those who knew of Ebrahim Raisi did so because of his tarnished reputation and his alleged role in the so-called “death commission”, a group of four individuals that issued the execution orders of thousands of prisoners in the summer of 1988. Raisi was 28 then. Another member of the commission was Mostafa Pour Mohammadi, Rouhani’s Justice Minister.

In the summer of 2016, a 40-minute tape of a conversation between the late Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, then the designated successor of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini but later becoming one of the system’s most vocal critics, with the members of the commission surfaced. In the tape, Montazeri fiercely attacks the group of four for the atrocities committed by them. Pour Mohammadi’s response to the revelation of the tape was that he was “honoured to have carried out God’s commandment.”

Some circles in Iran maintain that Raisi is one of the candidates for Khamenei’s succession. Initially, Raisi declined the PFIRF’s offer to run for president. Sources said that he feared losing the presidential race and thus his chances to assume the exalted position of Iran’s supreme leader. But two points may have convinced him to change his mind.

First, it would be wise of him to appear on the Iranian political map as a first-tier cleric and politician before being considered for the high jump toward leadership. Second, losing the presidential race does not mean that he will lose his chance for leadership due to a lack of popularity. The leader is elected by the Assembly of Experts, which has shown it has no regard for the people’s opinion.

In a glaring example, in the 2016 election of the Assembly of Experts, Ahmad Jannati, the secretary of the powerful and ultra-conservative Guardian Council, was ranked last in Tehran and narrowly kept his seat on the assembly. However, he was later elected as the chairman of the assembly by an overwhelming number of its members. An interesting development in this election is the open involvement of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), which has differed from its previous practice of hiding such election involvement. This despite the fact that the organisation, as part of the military forces, is strictly banned from becoming involved in the election process and “taking sides for or against the candidates.”

Explicitly hostile posture

The IRGC has begun to adopt an explicitly hostile posture toward Rouhani in its official political organ, the weekly Sobhe Sadeq. In its latest issue dated April 10 (published on April 8), the featured commentary is titled, “The West’s favourite in the upcoming election.” In its opening paragraph, the commentary says that several think tanks in the US have warned “ [American] officials” about “a revolutionary president coming to office in Iran in the upcoming election, resulting in a change of the current direction [of Iran’s politics].” It adds, “But the question that comes to mind is, ‘Why do Americans favour the re-election of this administration?’”

Because, the commentary reasons, Rouhani and his team have taken a soft position against the US in the hope of fixing the country’s economy through settling the differences with the Americans.

The commentary argues that the current administration hoped that lifting the sanctions could serve as a panacea to Iran’s deteriorating economy. However, the piece adds that not only did the administration’s reconciliatory policy toward the US not bear any positive outcomes, it also led to the country as a whole now doing worse than before. In another column, in the same issue of the weekly, titled ‘Who are those who seek to discredit Raisi?’, five groups are introduced.

The column’s closing paragraph reads, “Those who were getting ready to, in coordination with their friends on the other side of the borders, make long-term plans based on the change of the behaviour of the Islamic republic (implicitly alluding to the foreign minister Javad Zarif and his American counterpart John Kerry) and thought they got rid of the revolutionaries, are now in a state of panic because of the possibility of the formation of a revolutionary administration.”

Regardless of the outcome of the election, the candidacy of Raisi will open a can of worms by reopening the case of the mass executions during the summer of 1988.

What threatens Raisi is the likely massive mobilisation of middle- and upper-middle class urbanites, especially the youth, who are vehemently opposed to the conservatives. By concentrating their efforts on social networks, they likely will seek to destroy Raisi by focusing on the events of 1988.

Shahir ShahidSaless is a political analyst and freelance journalist writing primarily about Iranian domestic and foreign affairs. He is also the co-author of Iran and the United States: An Insider’s View on the Failed Past and the Road to Peace.