Demonstrators wave Iranian flags as one holds up a poster of Iran’s Supreme Chief Ayatollah Ali Khamenei throughout a protest towards Israeli assaults on Iran, after the Friday prayer ceremonies on June 20, 2025 in central Tehran, Iran.
Majid Saeedi/Getty Pictures
disguise caption
toggle caption
Majid Saeedi/Getty Pictures
Within the aftermath of the 12-day struggle in June between Israel and Iran, questions have arisen about Iran’s Supreme Chief Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He’s 86 years outdated and was a possible Israeli goal through the battle, resulting in hypothesis about who would possibly succeed him.
There has solely been one earlier time when Iran went by way of a strategy of naming a brand new supreme chief — in 1989, when Khamenei was chosen to succeed Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the towering figurehead behind the 1979 Islamic revolution.
Now, almost 4 a long time on, that course of is as soon as once more unfolding, says Vali Nasr, an Iran skilled at Johns Hopkins College and the writer of Iran’s Grand Technique: A Political Historical past.
“Every part in Iran previously 4 or 5 years has actually been about succession,” he says.
Khamenei has periodically handed names of potential successors to the so-called Meeting of Specialists, a bunch of roughly 80 clerics who determine the subsequent chief — although, in impact, function a rubber stamp for regardless of the supreme chief needs. Nasr says after the current struggle with Israel and the U.S. bombing of key Iranian nuclear websites, the number of a successor has develop into extra pressing.
“I feel within the curiosity of preservation of the state and making certain its continuity, [Khamenei] created contingency plans to make a switch of energy rather more clean and fast,” he says.
Hypothesis over who could succeed Khamenei veers from hardliners like his 55-year-old son Mojtaba Khamenei and 52-year-old Hassan Khomeini, the grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini, to previous reform-minded presidents similar to Hassan Rouhani and Mohammad Khatami.
Afshan Ostovar, an Iran skilled on the Naval Postgraduate Faculty in Monterey, Calif., says Khamenei has good causes to not tip his hand as to who could succeed him.
“Khamenei goes to lose standing as a result of he’ll have a successor,” he says, including that the successor is probably going going to be a goal for political assaults. “So, the longer that successor is thought, the longer opponents are going to need to form of tarnish his model.”
Ostovar says the successor should be a cleric.
“If you did not have a cleric succeeding Khamenei, you’d not have an Islamic revolution. You not have an Islamic republic,” he says. “It can be a very totally different system.”
However Ali Vaez, who heads the Iran undertaking on the Worldwide Disaster Group assume tank, says the subsequent chief could not in truth be a spiritual determine. He notes that Iran has suffered deep setbacks underneath Khamenei: the economic system is battered, there’s severe discontent in society, it misplaced key proxies similar to Hezbollah within the area and its navy was decimated final month by Israel. Vaez says Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — a dominant, multipronged navy drive — may even see this as a chance for change.
“It’s fairly attainable that Ayatollah Khamenei is the final supreme chief of Iran,” he says. “It’s onerous to think about that the navy, the Revolutionary Guards, which has paid the best worth for Ayatollah Khamenei’s strategic errors, would proceed seeing the clerical institution as an asset and never as a legal responsibility.”
Whoever that successor is, the query turns into what sort of chief he can be — what {qualifications} and character does he (and it undoubtedly can be a he) need to have?
Ostovar says he’ll doubtless be seen as weak by Iran’s powerbrokers, together with clerics, politicians and enterprise leaders.
“Not one of the establishments of energy inside the Islamic Republic already are going to wish to simply hand over the dominion to anyone who’s going to develop into a dictator,” he says. “The weaker an individual is, the extra affect that each one the factions can probably train over that particular person.”
Khamenei himself was seen as weak when he was named supreme chief. However he was additionally crafty and aligned himself with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, says Nasr. For all sensible functions, he says, the revolutionary guards are already operating the nation.
“They’re within the authorities. They management media. They management huge areas of the economic system. They’re in resolution making circles in a approach,” he say. “They’re working the best way the Egyptian or the Pakistani navy function, behind a civilian facade.”
Nasr says there’s a realization amongst many energy brokers that issues have to vary — that Iran’s virulent anti-West stance has hit its restrict.
“There [are] highly effective voices that aren’t saying we should always tomorrow morning develop into absolute associates of the West,” he says. “However principally, they’re saying we should always finish the struggle with the West and we should always go down the trail of de-escalation.”
Nasr says after de-escalation can come normalization.
However how Khamenei dies might additionally have an effect on the choice about who subsequent runs Iran.
If he dies naturally, Nasr says, a reasonable might develop into supreme chief. If, nonetheless, Khamenei is assassinated, almost definitely a hardline cleric will take management — to keep up continuity after a violent finish to Khamenei’s rule.
