Rocky path President's death comes as challenges lie ahead

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.

- Patrick Wintour and Peter Beaumont

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 to claim the role was being subsumed in a form of autocracy created in the name of religion.

The presidency, however loyal to the supreme leader - and Raisi was considered very loyal to Khamenei is often cast in the role as a scapegoat helping the supreme leader to avoid criticism. That was the fate of Raisi's predecessor, Hassan Rouhani, who became a punchbag for decisions taken elsewhere.

In recent months Raisi, elected president in 2021 but in practice handpicked by the supreme leader, had been mentioned as a possible successor to Khamenei. His death instead clears a thorny path for Khamenei's son, Mojtaba Khamenei.

The choice is made by an 88-strong "assembly of experts", and Raisi's departure increases the chances of a hereditary succession in Iran, something many clerics oppose as alien to its revolutionary principles.

Raisi's death will add to the sense of a country already in political transition. A new hardline parliament was only elected on 1 March in which turnout for some of the elections fell below 10%, and was presented as reaching a nationwide turnout of only 41%-a record low.

Reformist or moderate politicians were either disqualified or soundly beaten, leaving a new and, as yet, untested division in parliament between traditional hardliners and an ultra-conservative group known as Paydari or the Steadfastness Front. The effective exclusion of reformists from participation in parliament for the first time since 1979 adds to the sense of a country in uncharted waters.