Mojtaba Khamenei has been named Iran’s new supreme leader just over a week after his father, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in attacks between the United States and Israel.
A statement from the Assembly of Experts (the panel of Shiite clerics responsible under Iranian law for electing the country’s top leader) said Mojtaba Khamenei had been selected as the third leader of the Islamic Republic, according to reports by state television IRIB and the Fars, Tasnim and ISNA news agencies.
President Donald Trump told Axios last week that the election would be “unacceptable” and suggested he wanted to personally elect a new supreme leader, a process typically overseen by Iran’s clerics.
“They are wasting their time. Khamenei’s son is a lightweight. I have to participate in the appointment,” he said. “Khamenei’s son is unacceptable to me.”
Follow live updates.
Trump echoed this sentiment in an interview with ABC News, saying the new leader “won’t last long” if Iranian leaders don’t get his approval.
The Israel Defense Forces warned on Sunday that any successor to Ali Khamenei would be considered a target.
The semi-official Mehr news agency confirmed last week that Khamenei’s son was alive and well after deadly attacks launched by the United States and Israel that killed his father and other members of his family, including Mojtaba Khamenei’s wife.
Mehr reported that Mojtaba Khamenei was “monitoring matters related to the family’s martyrs, managing matters and providing consultation and review on important national issues.”
Mojtaba Khamenei, a politician and cleric, is known to have significant influence among administrators and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But it is not particularly popular in Iran, where father-to-son succession is also frowned upon in the country, particularly after the overthrow of the US-backed monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979.
He also lacks his father’s religious credentials to lead a clerical regime, which claims to represent God’s will on Earth.
“Most Iranians expected a transition to a system of government led not by an Islamic cleric, but rather by a president and a council of ministers, preceded, of course, by a referendum,” said Valentine Moghadam, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Northeastern University in Boston, speaking before the appointment.
“But that seems to have become impossible due to the recent attack by Israel and the United States,” he said.
Questions about who will succeed Khamenei have been complicated by the death of Iran’s then-president Ebrahim Raisi, long considered a possible successor, in a helicopter crash in May 2024.
But the regime will be willing to show Israel, the United States and the Iranian people that it is not collapsing, Javed Ali, a former top counterterrorism official and now an associate professor at the University of Michigan, said before the appointment.
“The election of the next supreme leader is obviously a signal,” he added.
Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, an associate fellow at Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa programme, said before the appointment that “the signal such a nomination will give is that nothing will change”.
Despite what little support there may be for Iran’s new supreme leader, without regime change in Iran, they would presumably maintain the same “iron grip on control through the institutions of power,” Ali said.
“The next supreme leader will enter that same system,” he added.
The Assembly of Experts last met to select a new leader in 1989, when they elected Ali Khamenei. The new leader must be a man and must be an Islamic cleric according to Iranian law.
The appointment of Mojtaba Khamenei as supreme leader makes him an immediate target, with Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warning on Wednesday that any new leader would become “an unequivocal target for elimination.”
He stressed that Israel and the United States would work together “to crush the capabilities of the regime and create conditions for the Iranian people to overthrow and replace it.”
