Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian and several other officials were aboard a helicopter that crashed today in mountainous northwestern Iran while returning from a visit to the border with Azerbaijan. As of tonight, Iranian authorities have not publicly confirmed the fate of everyone aboard, and rescue teams are searching difficult terrain in poor weather. The uncertainty surrounding the president naturally dominates attention, but the crisis also reveals something fundamental about the Iranian political system: despite the enormous importance of the presidency, the survival of the Islamic Republic does not depend primarily on the president. Iran has deliberately constructed a political architecture in which elected institutions exist inside a larger unelected system centred on the Supreme Leader. Understanding that distinction is essential to understanding both the resilience and limitations of the Iranian state.
Iran is frequently described simply as an authoritarian country, which is broadly useful but institutionally incomplete. Iranians vote for a president and parliament, elections contain real competition among candidates permitted to participate, political factions disagree over economic and foreign policy, and changes in presidents can alter policy substantially. Mohammad Khatami’s reformist presidency looked different from Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s populist conservatism; Hassan Rouhani pursued the nuclear agreement with Western governments; Raisi represented a considerably more conservative political direction. Elections therefore matter. Yet they operate inside boundaries determined partly by institutions citizens do not directly control, particularly the Supreme Leader and Guardian Council. Iran is consequently better understood as a hybrid institutional structure in which electoral politics allocates some power while unelected institutions define much of the range within which that power operates.
The presidency illustrates this hierarchy clearly. Raisi administers the government, appoints ministers, oversees substantial economic policy and represents Iran diplomatically. He is not commander-in-chief in the conventional presidential sense and does not possess final authority over Iran’s strategic direction. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Supreme Leader since 1989, sits above the elected executive in the constitutional structure and holds ultimate authority over the armed forces while exercising enormous influence over foreign policy, security institutions and judicial appointments. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC, meanwhile possesses substantial military, political and economic power independent of ordinary presidential administration.
This means the disappearance of the president, however consequential personally and politically, does not automatically create a crisis of regime continuity. Iran’s constitution contains procedures for presidential incapacity or death, under which the first vice-president can assume responsibilities with the Supreme Leader’s approval while arrangements are made for a new election. The existence of that mechanism demonstrates the difference between personal power and institutionalised power. Political systems become more resilient when succession does not require improvisation each time a leader disappears.
This principle applies across regime types. Britain can replace a prime minister rapidly because authority belongs primarily to institutions rather than the individual. Portugal replaced António Costa through constitutional procedures after his resignation. Pakistan becomes more unstable partly because changes in political leadership frequently interact with imprisonment, exile or military influence. Personalist dictatorships are even more vulnerable because the ruler may deliberately prevent credible successors from developing, fearing that any person capable of replacing them is also capable of challenging them.
Succession therefore creates a dictator’s paradox. A ruler wants capable subordinates because government needs them. The ruler simultaneously fears capable subordinates because they can become alternative centres of loyalty. Highly personalist regimes often solve the immediate political problem by weakening everyone below the leader. That increases the ruler’s security while reducing the regime’s resilience when succession eventually becomes unavoidable.
Iran partially avoids this because its most powerful office is itself institutionalised. Khamenei is enormously powerful personally, but the office of Supreme Leader is embedded within the constitution, clerical establishment, security apparatus and bodies such as the Assembly of Experts, which formally possesses responsibility for selecting the Supreme Leader. The actual politics of succession would undoubtedly involve intense elite bargaining, but there is at least an institutional framework through which that bargaining can occur.
This is why today’s helicopter crash is politically significant without necessarily being systemically destabilising. The president may disappear while the deeper distribution of authority remains intact. The Supreme Leader remains in office. The IRGC remains intact. The bureaucracy remains intact. The security services remain intact. Parliament remains intact. The constitution specifies succession.
State continuity is produced by redundancy.
A resilient political system assumes individuals eventually disappear and distributes enough knowledge and authority that their absence does not destroy the organisation. The same principle applies to companies, militaries and universities. An institution whose operation depends entirely on one person may appear extraordinarily effective while that person remains and extraordinarily fragile once they leave.
Iran’s larger succession problem therefore is not Raisi.
It is Khamenei.
The Supreme Leader is 85 years old, and Iran will eventually need to manage the first transition in that office since Khamenei succeeded Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1989. That transition will be vastly more consequential because the Supreme Leader sits at the centre of the institutions coordinating the political system. Raisi himself had sometimes been discussed as one possible future successor, although Iranian succession politics remain opaque and no outcome should be assumed.
This makes today’s uncertainty potentially important beyond the presidency. If Raisi had become part of elite calculations surrounding the eventual succession to Khamenei, his removal from politics could change the bargaining environment even if presidential succession proceeds smoothly. One individual can therefore be replaceable in one institutional role while important in another future coalition.
This is the distinction between office power and network power. Formal constitutions tell us which powers belong to an office. Political networks tell us which individuals connect institutions, factions and elites. A politician can possess influence beyond their constitutional authority because other actors expect them to acquire future power or because they maintain relationships across several institutions.
Raisi’s political trajectory illustrates this. Before becoming president in 2021, he headed Iran’s judiciary and occupied several important positions inside the Islamic Republic. His political significance therefore extended beyond administering the executive branch. Yet even a politically important individual operates within a system larger than themselves.
That system’s resilience comes with a democratic cost. The same unelected institutions ensuring continuity also constrain electoral accountability. If voters dislike foreign policy, military strategy or fundamental constitutional direction, replacing the president does not necessarily replace the institutions determining those policies. Citizens therefore possess partial electoral accountability.
This can create an accountability gap.
Who is responsible for economic failure?
The president controls ministries.
Sanctions arise partly from foreign policy.
Foreign policy is heavily influenced by the Supreme Leader and security institutions.
Parliament shapes legislation.
The Guardian Council constrains candidate selection.
Responsibility becomes distributed across institutions possessing different relationships with voters.
When authority and accountability do not overlap, citizens struggle to identify whom elections should punish.
This resembles the dual-accountability problem in Pakistan, although the institutional architecture differs substantially. Pakistani elected governments operate alongside a military possessing major informal political influence. Iran formalises much of its unelected authority constitutionally. In both cases, citizens elect governments that do not possess complete control over the state.
That can weaken democratic accountability because elected politicians can blame unelected institutions while unelected institutions do not face ordinary electoral removal.
At the same time, divided authority can increase regime resilience because no single election can transform the entire political system.
This is intentional in Iran.
The Islamic Republic was designed partly to combine popular sovereignty with clerical guardianship. Its constitutional theory does not accept the liberal-democratic assumption that unrestricted popular sovereignty should be the final source of political authority. The Supreme Leader and Guardian Council exist partly to ensure electoral politics remains within the ideological and religious framework established by the revolution.
Supporters view this as protecting the Islamic character of the state from temporary political majorities.
Critics view it as ensuring voters can choose governments only within boundaries they did not choose.
Both descriptions point towards the same institutional mechanism.
The Guardian Council demonstrates it especially clearly because it vets candidates for major elections. Iranians therefore choose among candidates after an unelected institution has already determined who may compete. Reformist and moderate candidates have sometimes participated successfully, but the political supply available to voters remains constrained.
This is the upstream electoral-integrity problem again.
Ballots aggregate preferences from the options institutions permit.
The degree of competition among those options can vary substantially without changing the basic structure.
Raisi’s own 2021 election occurred after several potential competitors were disqualified, contributing to unusually low turnout. His victory was legally valid within Iran’s electoral system while occurring inside a political environment where candidate selection had already narrowed competition.
This is why simply reporting that Iran “holds elections” tells us too little.
Elections can perform several functions besides transferring unrestricted power.
They can distribute offices among approved factions.
Measure political participation.
Generate legitimacy.
Allow limited policy correction.
Mobilise citizens.
None necessarily gives voters final authority over the constitutional order.
Iran’s system uses elections partly in these ways.
That helps explain why presidential succession matters despite the Supreme Leader’s dominance. Elections still provide information about public preferences and redistribute authority inside the permitted political spectrum. A new president could change economic priorities, diplomatic tone and the relationship between government and social restrictions even without altering the fundamental regime.
Partial competition can therefore produce real policy consequences.
Political systems do not need to be fully democratic for elections to matter.
The economic stakes are particularly large because Iran faces persistent inflation, sanctions and limited integration with Western markets despite possessing enormous oil and gas reserves. Presidential governments can affect budget policy, subsidies and economic administration, but sanctions depend heavily on nuclear and regional policies over which the presidency has constrained authority.
This creates another responsibility mismatch. Citizens experience inflation and unemployment through elected government while some of the geopolitical decisions contributing to economic isolation originate partly outside that government’s control.
Sanctions themselves create complicated distributional effects. They restrict trade, investment and technology, reducing economic opportunity for ordinary Iranians. They also create rents for organisations capable of navigating sanctions through informal trade networks. Institutions connected to the state and security apparatus may therefore become relatively more economically powerful as ordinary international commerce becomes harder.
Economic isolation can consequently strengthen parts of the political system sanctions are intended to pressure.
This is the sanctions paradox. External economic pressure reduces national resources while redistributing some remaining opportunities towards actors best positioned to circumvent restrictions.
That does not mean sanctions have no coercive effect. It means their political consequences depend on who bears costs and who controls adaptation.
Iran has become increasingly integrated economically with China and maintains important commercial relationships with India, Russia and regional neighbours. Western sanctions therefore have pushed rather than completely isolated Iranian trade networks.
Again, global multipolarity reduces the effectiveness of economic coercion because targeted states possess alternative partners.
This is one reason the emerging relationship between Iran, Russia and China deserves attention. All three face different forms of Western pressure and possess incentives to expand trade, military cooperation and diplomatic coordination with one another.
Their interests are not identical.
Shared opposition to American dominance creates enough overlap for cooperation.
Economic sanctions can therefore generate coalition externalities: pressure on several adversaries individually gives them stronger incentives to cooperate collectively.
The same mechanism appeared after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Iran supplied Russia with drones.
Russia provides Iran with diplomatic and potentially military relationships.
China purchases substantial quantities of Iranian oil.
Networks adapt around restrictions.
Economic coercion therefore changes the architecture of international trade rather than simply reducing it.
Iran’s political succession will influence how these relationships evolve, but structural incentives will survive any one president. A more moderate president might seek greater engagement with Europe or revive negotiations over nuclear issues. The Supreme Leader and security institutions would still determine the boundaries of acceptable compromise.
This demonstrates the importance of separating leaders from regimes in international relations.
Foreign governments frequently personalise diplomacy because individuals are easier to understand than institutions.
Putin’s Russia.
Xi’s China.
Modi’s India.
Erdoğan’s Turkey.
Raisi’s Iran.
Personal leadership matters enormously.
Yet states contain bureaucracies, security institutions, economic interests and ideological structures that survive individual leaders.
Policies based entirely on changing one person therefore can misunderstand the durability of the system producing the policy.
Iran is especially instructive because Western political discourse sometimes imagines regime change as though removing senior leaders would automatically produce a different strategic orientation. Iran contains a young population, substantial dissatisfaction and major ideological diversity. It also contains deeply institutionalised security and clerical networks with enormous interests in regime continuity.
Political transformation would therefore depend on changes across several institutions rather than one leadership vacancy.
The helicopter crash demonstrates that visually.
One of the country’s highest officials may be absent.
The system continues operating.
This is not necessarily evidence that the system is popular.
It is evidence that it is institutionalised.
Legitimacy and durability are different variables.
A government can survive without broad enthusiasm if institutions coordinate effectively and opposition cannot organise sufficiently to replace it.
A popular government can collapse if institutions are too weak to manage succession.
Political stability therefore should not be inferred directly from public approval.
Iran has experienced major protest movements, most recently after the death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, when demonstrations spread nationally under the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom”. The government suppressed those protests through extensive coercion while also confronting genuine social dissatisfaction over compulsory hijab rules, political restrictions and economic conditions.
The protests demonstrated that substantial parts of society reject important aspects of the political system.
Their failure to remove the regime demonstrated that dissatisfaction alone does not produce political change.
This is another collective-action problem.
Millions can dislike government while lacking the organisation, elite support or coercive capacity required to replace it.
States survive through institutions.
Opposition movements need institutions too.
Leadership.
Networks.
Funding.
Communication.
Alternative governing structures.
Without them, protest can impose costs without producing succession.
This is why authoritarian regimes target organisations so heavily. Individual dissatisfaction is manageable. Coordinated dissatisfaction becomes political power.
The IRGC’s role is crucial because it provides the regime with both coercive and organisational capacity. It is not simply a military force. It possesses economic interests, political networks and relationships with regional armed organisations.
That makes Iranian succession partly a question of whether political institutions can preserve equilibrium among the clerical establishment, security apparatus and elected government.
Khamenei has managed that balance for decades.
His eventual successor may possess less personal authority initially.
That could make the transition more competitive among elites even if constitutional procedures function smoothly.
This is the founder-successor problem common to political organisations. Long-serving leaders accumulate authority through time that cannot be transferred automatically with the office. The successor receives formal powers immediately but inherits personal legitimacy gradually, if at all.
Khamenei himself faced this challenge after Khomeini, whose revolutionary authority was unique.
The Islamic Republic adapted.
The next transition will test whether it can do so again.
Today’s crisis therefore offers a smaller rehearsal.
If Raisi cannot return to office, constitutional mechanisms will need to replace the president rapidly while reassuring citizens, markets and foreign governments that policy continuity remains intact.
The speed and predictability of that process will provide information about state capacity.
Currencies and markets respond to political uncertainty because uncertainty changes expected future policy. A clear succession mechanism lowers the risk premium associated with leadership loss.
Institutions therefore possess economic value through predictability.
This is why constitutional succession matters even in authoritarian systems.
Investors do not necessarily care whether a replacement leader was selected democratically before deciding whether contracts will remain valid. They care whether the rules determining authority are stable enough to forecast.
Political legitimacy and economic predictability overlap but are not identical.
Saudi Arabia can provide substantial policy predictability without competitive national elections.
Some democracies provide electoral legitimacy while experiencing unstable coalition governments.
The strongest systems combine both legitimacy and predictability.
Iran prioritises continuity heavily.
Its constitutional structure is designed to ensure that changes in elected leadership do not threaten the ideological foundations of the state.
That produces resilience.
It also limits the amount of political correction elections can generate.
This is the central trade-off exposed by today’s helicopter crash.
If political authority were concentrated entirely in Raisi, Iran would now face a profound regime crisis.
Because authority is distributed across stronger unelected institutions, the state can continue relatively predictably.
But those same institutions mean Iranian citizens cannot use presidential elections to change much of the strategic direction those institutions protect.
Institutional redundancy preserves the regime.
It constrains popular sovereignty.
The question for Iran therefore is not simply who becomes president next if succession becomes necessary.
It is how much the identity of the president can matter inside a system intentionally designed so that no president can determine the country’s fundamental direction alone.
That distinction will become even more important when Iran eventually faces the succession that truly sits at the centre of its political order: the replacement of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
For now, rescue teams are still searching and the immediate facts remain uncertain. The fate of the people aboard the helicopter should not be assumed before Iranian authorities establish it.
But the institutional lesson is already visible.
A helicopter carrying the president can disappear into the mountains.
The state cannot disappear with it.
Political systems become durable when they possess rules for the moment individuals do.
Iran has spent forty-five years building exactly that kind of regime.
The strength of those institutions explains why today’s crisis may not threaten the state’s continuity.
The nature of those institutions explains why continuity and democracy are not the same thing.
