The death of the Iranian president, Ebrahim Raisi, in a helicopter crash comes at a time when the country, faced by unprecedented external challenges, was already bracing itself for a change in regime with the expected demise in the next few years of its 85-year-old supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
In the country’s hydra-headed leadership where power is spread in often opaque ways between clerics, politicians and army, it is the supreme leader, not the president, that is ultimately decisive.
Indeed, in some ways the posts of president and prime minister became overwhelmed in the drafting of Iran’s constitution in 1979, leading to advocates of a more powerful presidency
