Three-minute read
In late May 2025, Iran’s ruling clerical establishment marked the first anniversary of former regime President Ebrahim Raisi’s death with what state media described as over 120,000 commemorative events across the country. The number is staggering—not just for its logistical audacity in a nation mired in economic despair, but for what it reveals: a regime so insecure in its legitimacy that it turns mourning into political theater and turns a controversial president into a national martyr.
Official messaging—chiefly from the regime’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei—painted Raisi as a humble servant of the people, a devout revolutionary who governed with compassion, integrity, and selflessness. His opposition to direct negotiations with the United States was lauded as proof of unwavering ideological fidelity. His “long hours” and “tireless devotion” were presented as evidence of spiritual superiority. And most critically, his legacy was invoked as emblematic of the clerical dictatorship’s incorruptible strength.
Yet beneath the eulogies and orchestrated grief, a different narrative persists—one harder to script and harder still to suppress. Raisi was known domestically and internationally less for his compassion than for his role in the 1988 mass executions of political prisoners, an episode that earned him the nickname “Butcher of Tehran.” His tenure in office coincided with brutal crackdowns during the 2019 protests and the 2022–23 nationwide uprisings sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody. For many Iranians, Raisi’s name evokes not service but repression. That this reality intruded even into state media coverage—where some officials acknowledged he was dubbed “Ayatollah Edaam” (Ayatollah Execution)—speaks to the tension between image-making and truth-telling in today’s Iran.
Ebrahim Raisi, a vital member of the “Death committee” in the 1988 massacre of 30,000 political prisoners in #Iran, is scheduled to speak at the #UNGA on September 19. It's crucial to hold him accountable. @CFR_org#ProsecuteRaisiNOW pic.twitter.com/P3og0YdvhP
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) September 18, 2023
The sheer scale of the commemorative campaign suggests something more than grief: a concerted attempt to restore fear, unify fractured security forces, and reassert ideological control. Reports from within Iran indicate the regime is experiencing significant erosion in loyalty among mid-level personnel in the Revolutionary Guard and Basij forces—once its most dependable instruments of internal enforcement. In this context, Raisi is being rebranded not merely as a fallen president but as a revolutionary icon meant to inspire wavering troops and demoralize dissidents. The message is not subtle: the path to power is through obedience, sacrifice, and, if necessary, bloodshed.
This effort to mythologize Raisi also comes at a time of intense internal fragility. Following years of crushing sanctions, rampant inflation, and deepening social discontent, the clerical dictatorship faces what may be its most serious legitimacy crisis since the 1979 revolution. Khamenei’s repeated denunciations of perceived enemies—opposition groups, the U.S., and European governments—serve less as strategic positioning than as ritual affirmations meant to hold together a fractured elite. In a telling admission, Raisi himself once claimed that “no unrest in four decades has occurred without a trace of the Mojahedin,” referring to the People’s Mojahedin Organization (PMOI/MEK).
There is also the question of cost. Critics within Iran’s own establishment—including a former intelligence interrogator turned reformist media activist, Abbas Abdi—openly questioned the logic of spending vast sums on glorifying Raisi when millions of Iranians are facing poverty and food insecurity. “They want to hold 120,000 ceremonies,” Abdi wrote, “but they can’t write 120 positive lines about his presidency.” Such remarks, published in state-approved outlets, underscore a widening rift within the political class—a debate not over the regime’s moral compass, but over its survival strategy.
Watch and judge how this state official admits that #Iran's regime is suffering from an all time low morale at the level of its @religious ranks pic.twitter.com/Ra3I2HZocV
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) February 7, 2024
That survival increasingly leans on spectacle. Giant posters, choreographed processions, and televised tributes are used to substitute for political legitimacy. The goal is to signal resolve to a public that is less awed than exhausted—and to international observers who may mistake mass mobilization for mass support.
Yet the contradiction is evident. A state confident in its foundations does not need to spend scarce resources proving that its fallen leaders were beloved. It does not need to remind citizens—again and again—that execution remains its chosen language of governance. And it certainly does not need to sanctify a man whom millions associate with repression, not reverence.
What the clerical dictatorship calls commemoration, much of the public sees as coercion. In cities across Iran—Tehran, Isfahan, Ahvaz, Mashhad, and beyond—young Iranians risked arrest, torture, and death by setting fire to Raisi’s images and defacing his memorials. These are not isolated acts of vandalism; they are deliberate, courageous statements from a generation that refuses to forget what Raisi stood for.
In the end, the mass glorification of Raisi reveals less about the regime’s power than its panic. This was not a display of confidence, but a spectacle of fear—met by defiance, not devotion. A mirror of desperation—polished, yes, but unmistakably cracked.