On June 18, the 13th presidential election of Iran will take place. A poll by the TV channel Press TV indicates a landslide victory of the candidate Ibrahim Raisi over the other candidates.
Ibrahim Raisi was born in 1960 in the Nu'an area near the city of Mashhad. Already at a young age he connected with religion, and at the age of 15 he enrolled in a seminary that trains Shiite clerics in the city of Kom. After completing his contract, he began his academic studies at various institutions in Iran, but studied for his doctorate in jurisprudence and the foundations of Shiite Islamic law at the martyrdom of the martyr Muthari in Tehran (some Iranian sources claim that his degree is controversial).
After the revolution he was appointed general prosecutor of Hamadan province, then rose through the ranks and became deputy prosecutor of the city of Tehran. But the action that made headlines for the first time was the killing of dissidents in 1988. Raisi was one of four key people who executed between 4,500 and 30,000 (there is too much misinformation in the execution data) from the Mujahideen Khalq organization. At that time he was very close to Ayatollah Ruhallah Khomeini, and the latter gave him special powers independent of the Iranian legal system.
After Khomeini's death and Khomeini's rise, he was appointed the chief prosecutor of Tehran for about 5 years. In 1994 he was appointed head of the General Supervision Office. From 2004 he served for a decade as the First Vice President of the Supreme Court of Iran, and in 2014 he was appointed Chief Prosecutor of Iran. In parallel with his special role as Iran's Chief Prosecutor, he began serving as chairman of Astan Quds Razawi (the institution of trust in the Temple of Imam Rida and in charge of the Iranian charitable system).
In the 2017 election he was a candidate on behalf of the Popular Front Party of the Islamic Party (a party belonging to the Conservative current), but lost to incumbent President Hassan Rouhani when Rouhani received about 57.1% of the vote. During the 2017 election campaign, Raisi said "that Iran will establish ties with any country except Israel," which shows his hostile attitude toward the State of Israel.
In 2019 the writer Said Glucker on Al-Jazeera called Raisi as "Khamini's most likely successor" as Iran's future leader. In 2020 journalist Dexter Filkins wrote in the New Yoker "Most of the people I talk to in Iran mention Ibrahim Raisi's candidacy as Khamini's successor ".
There have been speculations in the past about the possibility that Qassem Suleimani will replace Khamenei after the latter passes away, but with his assassination in January 2020, Raisi's candidacy for the position of supreme leader grew stronger. It is important to clarify that even as Khamenei's own son Mujathaba Khamenei has been seen as a leading candidate for the position, but his religious and political status is still not strong enough so at this time Raisi is the leading candidate to succeed Khamenei.
Ibrahim Raisi will probably be the next president of Iran and maybe one day also the supreme leader of Iran, but it is important to remember that Raisi will not change his extremist attitude towards Israel or the West and therefore Israel and the West must start getting to know the people operating in Iran who directly affect the Middle East in general and us in particular.