Will Iran’s Next Supreme Leader Be Its Last?

Khamenei’s Succession Dilemma and the Future of the Islamic Republic

by Akbar Ganji

For years, Iran watchers have been spreading rumors about the demise of Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. When the Islamic Republic’s Assembly of Experts pushed back a major 2024 meeting from September to November, some theorized that Khamenei was ailing. When Khamenei spent time at that meeting detailing how to choose his successor, others asserted that his end was near. And whenever Khamenei disappears for too long, people speculate that the supreme leader has already died.

Right now, rumors of Khamenei’s demise are greatly exaggerated. He is still working, and his comments about succession merely restated Iran’s constitutional provisions. But from an actuarial perspective, Khamenei’s reign is almost certainly in its final years. The supreme leader is an 85-year-old cancer survivor. In 2022, when he visited the Imam Reza shrine in 2022, a Shiite holy site in the Iranian city of Mashhad, he told those traveling with him that it would probably be his last such trip. In the not-too-distant future, the Assembly of Experts will have to anoint a new supreme leader.

Khamenei has yet to publicly name a preferred heir. And over time, most of the candidates once seen as favorites have fallen out of contention. But there is a clear front-runner: Mojtaba Khamenei, the supreme leader’s son. The 56-year-old cleric already wields significant political power, manipulating elections to help his favored candidates. The elder Khamenei’s allies have been touting Mojtaba as the leader the country needs. They have, for example, praised Mojtaba as a distinguished Islamic jurist and thinker. They have simultaneously suggested that he is a modernizer who can eliminate corruption, fix the country’s stagnant economy, and calm an angry public.

Like any new supreme leader, Mojtaba would adjust Tehran’s policies once in office. He might, for example, lift some Internet restrictions in hopes of giving angry Iranians an outlet. Yet the idea that he will truly fix Iran is fanciful. The country’s main problem is not just bad political leadership but a bad political system. Iranians want a full-fledged democracy, not an autocracy. They want an end to discrimination and religious rule. But the younger Khamenei is just as committed to the Islamic Republic as the older one is. Mojtaba’s rise, or the rise of any other cleric, will thus prompt the country’s people to further pressure Tehran. The result could be mass protests, or even an outright revolt, against the government.

The United States and its allies cannot spark such an uprising themselves. But they can help Iranians who do protest the next supreme leader by lifting punishing sanctions. Although the current restrictions may deprive Tehran of money, their main effect is the impoverishment of ordinary Iranians—a population that needs more resources to successfully challenge the Islamic Republic.

FORTUNATE SON

In some ways, Mojtaba’s rise has been unusual. Although there is nothing uncommon about autocrats passing power to their children, Iran is a Shiite theocracy, and traditional Shiite philosophy strongly condemns hereditary rule. In Shiite theology, the authority of imams stems from divine duty, not from inheritance. Shiite political leaders should thus be selected based on religious qualifications—not based on who their parents happen to be. Ruhollah Khomeini, Iran’s first supreme leader, appealed to this principle when he blocked his own overambitious son from succeeding him in the late 1980s.

Khamenei once shared Khomeini’s view. In a speech delivered in January 1990, he decried monarchical systems, mocking the transfer of sovereignty from a king to his son as the equivalent of a man passing a copper washbasin on to his heir. But today, Khamenei seems to have a different view. Religious scholars affiliated with him have begun claiming that Mojtaba is a distinguished jurist, one whose expertise qualifies him to be supreme leader. In video clips circulating on social media, prominent clerics have referred to Mojtaba as an ayatollah, a rank he has not yet earned. They have argued that if he were to become supreme leader, it would be justified on the basis of his religious expertise, not the fact that he is Khamenei’s son.

Yet there is little evidence that the younger Khamenei possesses the religious background the Iranian constitution requires. According to that document, the supreme leader must have “juridical qualifications for expressing proper views on various areas of Islamic jurisprudence.” Mojtaba does not. Whereas the elder Khamenei had published multiple books on theological topics before rising to power, the younger one has published none. Mojtaba does teach classes on Islamic law, but none of his instruction has been made public. He has never given any public speeches. Iranians can find clips of Mojtaba talking, but they are all less than five minutes long.

Mojtaba Khamenei at Hezbollah’s office in Tehran, October 2024Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader / West Asia News Agency / Reuters

To some of Mojtaba’s supporters, the lack of religious qualifications and oratorical skills may not matter. In fact, some dissimilarity between Mojtaba and his father is a plus. Several conservative Iranian newspapers have argued that the younger Khamenei would revitalize Iran’s old and sclerotic government, in part by cleaning up corruption. In a November 2024 interview, Abbas Palizdar, the former secretary of the Iranian parliament’s judiciary committee, accused multiple high-level Iranian officials of graft. He then praised Mojtaba as the only honest, anticorruption, and freedom-loving candidate to succeed his father—going on to pray that Mojtaba would become supreme leader.

Other influential Iranians have gone further, claiming that Mojtaba is a progressive.

For instance, Abdul Reza Davari, a former adviser to the highly conservative former Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has compared him to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who—although hardly a liberal—has opened Saudi Arabia’s economy and lifted many social restrictions. Notably, Iranian security forces and intelligence organizations have not fielded any objections to this comparison, even though the Islamic Republic has routinely vilified the crown prince as anti-Islamic and corrupt.

Yet these claims are just as absurd as the assertions that Mojtaba is an Islamic legal expert. The younger Khamenei is certainly experienced in Iranian politics, but his interventions have almost always been on behalf of hard-liners. When the reformist Mohammad Khatami won the presidency in 1997, Mojtaba fought back tooth and nail. Along with his allies in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, Mojtaba successfully prevented Khatami from lifting political and social restrictions. They shut down reformist newspapers and imprisoned activists and dissidents. Khatami even publicly protested their actions, declaring that “every nine days, a crisis was created for my government.”

Sometimes, Mojtaba has been even more extreme than his father. In the 2005 presidential election, the elder Khamenei and his inner circle supported the candidacy of the regime insider Ali Larijani. But Mojtaba and his partners successfully swung the election to Ahmadinejad. To do so, they rigged the vote, including by submitting forged ballots. In response, two of the other main candidates—Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mehdi Karroubi—publicly rebuked Mojtaba’s schemes. Karroubi wrote a letter to Khamenei decrying “interference by your respected son, Agha Seyyed Mojtaba, in favor of one of the candidates.” But Khamenei was unmoved. When two other senior Iranian officials complained to Khamenei about his son’s political interference, Khamenei replied, “He is a man of substance on his own merit, not a mere ‘son of an official.’”

SYSTEM FAILURE

Mojtaba could still lose his bid to become supreme leader. Khamenei has already proved willing to set aside front-runners. He sidelined Larijani in 2005, for example, and former Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi fell out of Khamenei’s favor as his presidency floundered. (Raisi died in a May 2024 helicopter crash.) But Khamenei could ultimately endorse other senior officials. Ali Asghar Hejazi, the chief of security in the supreme leader’s office, is the most prominent of them. He is the official Khamenei appears to trust the most and the only to attend all of Khamenei’s private meetings.

But Hejazi shares Khamenei’s ideological outlook. So, for that matter, do most of the dark horse candidates. That means almost no matter who succeeds Khamenei—Mojtaba, Hejazi, or someone else—Iran is in for another rough period. The country is home to a highly educated population with an intensely critical society. Outside information is increasingly available: these days, for example, nearly every major book that is published (including those by Israeli novelists) is almost immediately translated into Persian. The country’s people want freedom, democracy, human rights, and pluralism. The gap between these desires and the state’s repression has led to mass protests in 1999, 2009, 2017, 2019, and 2022. Notably, this anger is targeted not just at Khamenei but at the entire regime. During the 2009 demonstrations, for example, Iranians protested Mojtaba after the younger Khamenei helped Ahmadinejad secure reelection. “Mojtaba, may you face death before seeing leadership,” they chanted.

The pressure on the next supreme leader will likely be even greater. Iranians are growing more assertive; many political prisoners have acquired smartphones that they use to broadcast their thinking and influence. Should Khamenei’s successor maintain clerical rule, Iranian society will demand significant changes. The next supreme leader may succeed in cracking down on such unrest, through a combination of force and marginal concessions. But it is also possible that Iranians will force a broader reckoning, seizing on the inevitable opening that a change in leadership affords. Economic changes alone will certainly not be enough to sate the population. In the 46 years since the 1979 revolution, Iranian society has become wildly disgruntled. People’s demands are not limited to material well-being.

Iranians, however, will have the best chance of success if the country’s economy improves, yielding a strong middle class. Here is where outside countries can help. The crushing economic sanctions imposed by the West may be designed to keep Tehran weak. But by depriving ordinary Iranians of access to capital, sanctions have centralized the government’s power and made the state less transparent. In doing so, they have paralyzed Iranian civil society. U.S. and European policymakers should thus lift these restrictions. To transition from clerical rule to a democracy committed to human rights, Iranian society needs to be stronger and wealthier—such that ordinary people have the economic power needed to stage nonviolent political protests.

Right now, it is unclear whether U.S. President Donald Trump will lift any of Washington’s economic restrictions.

During his first term, Trump levied “maximum pressure” sanctions against Iran in a failed effort to bring the country to stop its nuclear program, and he has again spoken about trying to isolate Tehran. He likely cares little about Iranian democracy and what policies will best serve it. But Trump has also said that he would like to make a deal in which the Islamic Republic would forswear attacks on U.S. forces in the Middle East, attacks on Israel, and nuclear weapons in exchange for economic relief. Elon Musk, his billionaire chief adviser, has even met with senior Iranian officials to discuss such an agreement.

If those three conditions are all that Trump seeks, a deal might be achievable. Khamenei has historically oriented Iranian foreign policy toward China, Russia, and other U.S. competitors, but his policy lacks strong popular support, and his stance appears to have softened. He has, for example, allowed Iran’s reformist president, Masoud Pezeshkian, to call for direct negotiations with Washington.

In an ideal world, the two sides will talk and reach an agreement. A peace deal would serve the national interests of the United States, which will be more secure if Iran puts aside its nuclear program. It would also serve the interests of Tehran, which cannot afford a war with Washington. But most of all, it would serve the interests of the Iranian people, who want democracy and an end to discrimination. It would certainly do more to help them than will the next supreme leader, whoever he may be.