Suzanne Maloney on Markaz highlights some potential long range maneuvering taking place in the Iranian Presidential campaign by one of the candidates, cleric Ibrahim Raisi:
However, recent events would appear to call Rouhani’s presumptive lock on a second term into question. In this sense, Ahmadinejad is, at least for the moment, mostly a sideshow. The real competition may come from Raisi, a former prosecutor whose political fortunes have risen stratospherically over the past year, when he was named the administrator of Iran’s oldest and wealthiest religious shrine and his name began to surface as a leading contender to succeed Khamenei. Although the supreme leader’s health appears to be relatively robust, his age (77) and the January 2017 death of another scion of the revolution—former president Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani—has brought the whispered guessing game about leadership transition out into a much more open debate.
Like Ahmadinejad, Raisi’s sudden decision to contest the presidency, Iran’s second highest slot but one that is distinctly subordinate to the supreme leader, provoked some double-takes. Iranian elections are heavily managed, but a significant element of improvisation and volatility is unavoidable. Anything less than a credible campaign and a commanding victory would undercut the effort to position him as a viable supreme leader. It’s possible Raisi’s bid for the presidency is a mere trial balloon, to boost his name recognition and test his capabilities to engage with Iranian citizens. Alternatively, a well-orchestrated election victory would benefit Raisi as a future supreme leader, by giving him the same national exposure and executive experience as Khamenei, who served as president for eight years before his own elevation.
This strategy does not seem to apply to former President Ahmadinejad, who just registered, as Ahmadinejad is an engineer and teacher, not a cleric.
