The line of President Ebrahim Raïssi, whose fate is currently uncertain after a helicopter accident on Sunday, is clear: ultraconservatism and order. Aged 63, he has led Iran since 2021 in a context of international trouble and internal protest.
Having presented himself as the champion of the disadvantaged classes and the fight against corruption, Ayatollah Raïssi was elected on June 18, 2021 in the first round of a vote marked by a record abstention for a presidential election, and the absence strong competitors.
A particularly symbolic outfit
Always wearing a black “seyyed” turban (descendant of Mohammed) and dressed in a religious cloak, he succeeded the moderate Hassan Rouhani, who beat him in the 2017 presidential election and could no longer run again afterwards. two consecutive terms.
Ebrahim Raïssi also emerged strengthened from the legislative elections held in March and mid-May, the first national election since the protest movement which shook Iran at the end of 2022 following the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman arrested for -compliance with the strict dress code of the Islamic Republic. The Iranian president then welcomed “a new historic failure inflicted on the enemies of Iran after the riots” of 2022. Parliament, which will take office on May 27, will be largely under the control of the conservative and ultraconservatives, who support his government.
In recent months, Ebrahim Raïssi has presented himself as a resolute opponent of Israel, providing his support to Hamas. Above all, he supported the unprecedented attack launched by Iran on April 13 against the Jewish state, with 350 drones and missiles, most of which were intercepted with the help of the United States and several other allied countries.
A president on the American blacklist
President Raïssi is on the American blacklist of Iranian officials sanctioned for “complicity in serious human rights violations”, accusations dismissed as null and void by the authorities in Tehran.
Born in 1960 in the holy Shiite city of Mashhad, he rose through the ranks of the judicial system for three decades, after being appointed prosecutor general of Karaj, near Tehran, at just 20 years old, in the wake of the victory of the Revolution Islamic law of 1979. He then served as prosecutor general of Tehran from 1989 to 1994, then deputy head of the Judicial Authority from 2004 to 2014, the year of his appointment as the country’s attorney general.
Many links with Ali Khamenei
In 2016, Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei placed him at the head of the powerful Astan-é Quds Razavi charitable foundation, which manages the mausoleum of Imam-Réza in Mashhad as well as an immense industrial and real estate heritage. Three years later, he became head of the Judicial Authority.
Ebrahim Raïssi took courses in religion and Islamic jurisprudence from Ayatollah Khamenei. Married to Jamileh Alamolhoda, professor of educational sciences at Chahid-Béhechti University in Tehran, with whom he had two daughters who graduated from higher education, he is the son-in-law of Ahmad Alamolhoda, imam of prayer and provincial representative of Guide in Mashhad, Iran’s second city.
No doubt aware that he had to try to bring together an Iranian society divided on the question of individual freedoms, he pledged during the 2021 electoral campaign to be the defender of “freedom of expression” and “fundamental rights of all Iranian citizens. But the 2022 protest movement showed that this promise had not been fulfilled.