The death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei after nearly 37 years in power raises crucial questions about Iran’s future.
The contours of a complex succession process began to take shape the morning after Khamenei’s assassination in a campaign of airstrikes by the United States and Israel.
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As outlined in its constitution, Iran on Sunday formed a council to assume leadership duties and govern the country.
The council consists of Iran’s sitting president, the head of the country’s judiciary and a member of the Guardian Council elected by Iran’s Expediency Council, which advises the supreme leader and resolves disputes with parliament.
Iran’s reformist president Masoud Pezeshkian and hardline judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei are its members who will step in and “temporarily assume all leadership duties.”
Although the leadership council will govern in the meantime, an 88-member panel called the Assembly of Experts “must, as soon as possible,” elect a new supreme leader under Iranian law.
The panel is made up entirely of Shiite clerics who are popularly elected every eight years and whose candidacies are approved by the Guardian Council, Iran’s constitutional watchdog.
That body is known for disqualifying candidates in several elections in Iran and the Assembly of Experts is no different. The Guardian Council banned former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate whose administration secured the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, from elections to the Assembly of Experts in March 2024.
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Ellie Geranmayeh, senior policy researcher and deputy director of the Middle East and North Africa program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told FRANCE 24 that she doubted the succession would be a surprise.
“The system learned in June that there was a target on Khamenei’s back and that they had put in place several different modes of succession options depending on the context in which his death arose,” he said.
“What I think will be quite critical in these discussions in terms of the type of figure and ideology that will come with the next supreme leader – if he is actually a figurehead rather than a body that replaces the deceased supreme leader – will be whether there is any political solution that the United States realistically offers or not.”
He said the risk that Iran could see the emergence of a tougher figure willing to set aside Iran’s long-standing strategy of “strategic patience” depends largely on how far the attack on the Islamic Republic goes.
“In a case where the United States and Israel are focused on total regime collapse, you will produce a much more confrontational system than we have potentially seen in a rather timid and calculated Islamic Republic of Iran.”
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behind closed doors
Administrative deliberations over succession and the machinations surrounding it take place far from the public eye, making it difficult to assess who may be the leading contender.
Previously, it was thought that Khamenei’s protégé, hardline president Ebrahim Raisi, could try to take over. However, he died in a helicopter crash in May 2024.
That has left one of Khamenei’s sons, Mojtaba, a 56-year-old Shiite cleric, as a potential candidate, although he has never held a government position.
But a father-to-son transfer in the case of a supreme leader could provoke anger, not only among Iranians already critical of clerical rule, but also among supporters of the system. Some may see it as anti-Islamic and in line with the creation of a new religious dynasty after the 1979 collapse of the US-backed government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
There has been only one other transfer of power in the position of Iran’s supreme leader, the top decision-maker since the country’s 1979 Islamic Revolution.
In 1989, Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died at age 86 after being the figurehead of the revolution and leading Iran during its eight-year war with Iraq. This transition now comes after Israel also launched a 12-day war against Iran in June 2025.
The supreme leader is at the heart of Iran’s complex, power-sharing Shiite theocracy, and has the final say on all matters of state.
He also serves as commander in chief of the country’s army and the powerful Revolutionary Guard, a paramilitary force that the United States designated a terrorist organization in 2019 and that Khamenei empowered during his rule.
The Guard, which has led the self-styled “Axis of Resistance,” a series of militant groups and allies across the Middle East aimed at countering the United States and Israel, also has vast wealth and property in Iran.
(FRANCE 24 with AP)
