How succession works in the case of a president's death in Iran (2024)

The Iranian Constitution mandates that in the case of the death of the president, the first vice president shall assume, with the approval of the Supreme Leader, the powers and functions of the president.

First Vice President MohammadMokhber would assume the role if the current president dies and Iran's Supreme LeaderAyatollah Ali Khamenei approves. Officials said earlier that Mokhber was en route to the area where the president's helicopter went down.

Additionally, the constitution mandates the three heads of the branches of government — the vice president, speaker of the parliament and the head of the judiciary — must arrange for an election to choose a new leader within 50 days of the vice president assuming the role of acting president.

Keep in mind: Iran's supreme leader serves as the final arbiter of domestic and foreign affairs in the Islamic Republic, dwarfing the powers of the country's president.

Unlike his predecessor, the moderate former President Hassan Rouhani, Raisi has fostered a close alliance with Khamenei.Many Iranians believe Raisi is being groomed to be elevated to the supreme leadership.

Iran’s president and foreign minister are presumed dead after Iranian media agencies reported that “no survivors” were found at the crash site of a helicopter carrying the two men and seven others.

Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi and Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian were among the senior officials on board the downed helicopter.

Drone footage of the wreckage taken by the Red Crescent and carried on state media FARS News Agency showed the crash site on a steep, wooded hillside, with little remaining of the helicopter beyond a blue and white tail.

No official announcement of their deaths has yet been made.

Reuters news agency also cited an unnamed Iranian official as saying all passengers are feared dead.

Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi was likely traveling on a Bell 212 helicopter that began operating in the late 1960s, according to CNN military analyst Cedric Leighton.

Leighton told CNN's Paula Newton that the difficulty in obtaining spare parts could have played a factor in the crash.

The helicopter was first produced in the United States and then in Canada, Leighton, a retired US Air Force colonel, said.

“So spareparts would have definitelybeen an issue for the Iranians.”

The crash of a helicopter carrying Iran’s president and foreign minister comes at an especially fraught moment in the Middle East – and for Iran domestically.

Israel’s war against Hamas and the subsequent humanitarian catastrophe that has unfolded in Gaza over the last seven months has inflamed global opinion and sent tensions soaring across the Middle East.

It has also brought a decades-long shadow war between Iran and Israel out into the open.

Last month Iran launched an unprecedented drone and missile attack on Israel — its first ever direct attack on the country — in response to a deadly apparent Israeli airstrike on Iran’s consulate in Damascus that killed a top commander in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards (IRGC).

Israel struck back a week later, according to US officials, hitting targets outside the Iranian city of Isfahan with a much smaller, calibrated response.

Since then the tit-for-tat direct strikes between the two have stopped. But the proxy war continues with Iran-backed militias such as Hamas and Hezbollah continuing to fight Israel’s forces.

Meanwhile, Iran’s hardline leadership has weathered an explosion of recent popular dissent on the streets at home where years of US-led sanctions have hit hard.

The country was convulsed by youth-led demonstrations against clerical rule and worsening economic conditions following the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iran’s notorious morality police.

Iranian authorities have since launched a widening crackdown on dissent in response to the protests.

That crackdown has led to human rights violations, some of which amount to “crimes against humanity,” according to a United Nations report released in March.

And while the protests for now have largely stopped, opposition to clerical leadership remains deeply entrenched among many Iranians, especially the young, who yearn for reform, jobs and a move away from stifling religious rule.

A former hardline judiciary chief with his own brutal human rights record, Raisi was elected president in 2021 in a vote that was heavily engineered by the Islamic Republic’s political elite so that he would run virtually uncontested.

While he is president, his powers aredwarfed by those ofSupreme LeaderAyatollah Ali Khamenei, who is the final arbiter of domestic and foreign affairs in the Islamic Republic.

"No survivors" were found at the crash site of the helicopter carrying Iran's President Ebrahim Raisi,Iranian state news agency IRINN and semi-official news agency Mehr News reported.

Some background: A former hardline judiciary chief, Raisi was Iran’s eighth president. The former prosecutor and judge was elected in 2021 following a historically uncompetitive presidential contest.

He oversaw a period ofintensified repression of dissent, according to human rights monitors.

Next in the line of succession would be First Vice President Mohammad Mokhber, if approved by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Iran's Supreme Leader serves as the final arbiter of domestic and foreign affairs in the Islamic Republic, dwarfing the powers of the country's president.

Unlike his predecessor, the moderate former President Hassan Rouhani, Raisi had fostered a close alliance with Khamenei.Many Iranians believed Raisi was being groomed to one day succeed the ailing 85-year-old Khamenei.

CNN's Tamara Qiblawi contributed reporting to this post.

Nine people were on the helicopter that crashed in northwest Iran on Sunday, including three officials, an imam and flight and security team members, Iran's Tasnim news reported.

The IRGC-run media outlet, Sepah, reported the nine included:

Born in 1960, Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi attended the seminary in Qom and earned a Ph.D in law from Shahid Motahari University.

He started his career as a prosecutor in the early 1980s, and rose from being prosecutor general of Tehran in 1994 to chief justice of the country by 2019.

His two years as Iran’s chief justice were marked by the intensified repression of dissent and human rights abuses,according to theCenter for Human Rights in Iran.

Raisi became president of Iran on June 19, 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. Overall voter turnout was only 48.8% – the lowest since the establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979.

TheUS sanctionedRaisi in November 2019, citing his participation in the 1988 “death commission” as a prosecutor, and aUnited Nations reportindicating that Iran’s judiciary approved the execution of at least nine children between 2018 and 2019.

He is the first elected Iranian leader to be under U.S. sanctions.

In 2021, he was elected to the presidency in a contest heavily engineered by the Islamic Republic’s political elite so that he would run virtually unchallenged. His inauguration was seen to signal the start of a new, harder-line era that could herald major shifts in the Islamic Republic’s policies at home and abroad.

Raisi has long opposed engagement with the West and is a close ally of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Read more about Raisi's life.

Correction: This post has been updated to remove a reference to former President Hassan Rouhani running in the 2021 election.