Mourners in Tehran yesterday. Credit…Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times
Videos posted by Iranian news agencies showed crowds lining the street in Tabriz, a city in northwestern Iran, yesterday for a procession carrying the flag-draped coffins of President Ebrahim Raisi, his foreign minister and six others killed in a helicopter crash on Sunday.
The procession in Tabriz was the first in a series of official events to bid farewell to Raisi, a hard-line cleric who had widely been viewed as a potential successor to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader.
The country is grappling with the shock of losing two of its top leaders at such a volatile moment. Now, Khamenei is weighing options for how to move forward with elections and rebuild the country’s leadership structure.
He must choose between opening the race and facing moderate rivals, or limiting candidates and risking the embarrassment of low voter turnout, my colleague Erika Solomon reports.
