The death of Ayatollah Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani has cast a shadow of uncertainty over the course of Iran's politics and crucially of the country's leadership transition at a crucial time. A wily former president and the last of the senior leaders of the Islamic revolution in 1979, Rafsanjani was close to both supreme leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini who led that revolution, and in the past with his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But this "pillar of the Islamic revolution" became an important figurehead and advocate for reformists within its establishment; a loss they will feel deeply. He believed that the Islamic state would only survive if it reformed.
Rafsanjani's revolutionary credentials and associations allowed him both to say things that others couldn't and made him almost irreplaceable. Although his eventual identification with modernisation, pragmatism and democratisation led to this one-time hardliner being increasingly sidelined by conservatives, and even banned from contesting the presidency by the Guardian Council, an electoral vetting body controlled by conservatives. Yet he remained hugely influential. Reformists Hassan Rouhani, the current president, and Mohammad Khatami, a former president, both owe their political careers to him, and Rouhani's prospects in May's general election have been hit hard by his demise.
As importantly, Rafsanjani’s death leaves a gaping hole in the Assembly of Experts, responsible for the succession of supreme leader Khamenei whose health has been a cause for concern.
Just as he warned internally about the threat of "Islamic fascism" when hard-liners sought to influence elections – and broke with Khamenei over the hard-line role of President Ahmadinejad – Rafsanjani also spoke of the need for Iran to reach out to to the international community, notably the US, to break from its self-inflicted isolation. He became an important advocate for the deal that would limit the country's nuclear programme – his death, a comfort to those who would celebrate Donald Trump's determination to wreck the agreement; "the worst deal ever negotiated".