The elimination of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, ending a nearly 37-year reign as Iran's supreme leader, has thrown the country's future into deep uncertainty, The Washington Post reported. By the following morning, the outline of what promises to be a complex succession process had already begun to take shape.
Iran's constitution provided the initial blueprint: on Sunday, a governing council was formally established to absorb the supreme leader's responsibilities in the interim. Seated on that council are three figures – the incumbent president, the nation's top judiciary official, and a Guardian Council representative selected by the Expediency Council, the body that both counsels the supreme leader and arbitrates disputes between the government and parliament.
Among those designated to "temporarily assume all the duties of leadership" are Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian and hard-line judiciary head Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei.
In parallel with that interim arrangement, Iranian law requires the 88-member Assembly of Experts to "must, as soon as possible" select a permanent supreme leader – even as the council continues to govern.
Composed entirely of popularly elected Shiite clerics serving eight-year terms, the Assembly's membership requires Guardian Council approval – a constitutional watchdog with an established record of barring candidates across Iranian elections. The panel proved no exception: in March 2024, the body excluded former President Hassan Rouhani, a relatively moderate who shepherded the 2015 nuclear accord with world powers, from seeking an Assembly seat.
Because clerical succession deliberations unfold well beyond public scrutiny, identifying the leading contenders remains speculative at best, the report noted.
The most anticipated line of succession collapsed in May 2024, when Ebrahim Raisi – Khamenei's hard-line protégé and presumed heir – was killed in a helicopter crash. Attention has since turned to Mojtaba Khamenei – the late supreme leader's son, a 56-year-old Shiite cleric with no record of government service. A dynastic transfer, however, risks inflaming both opponents of clerical rule and loyalists within the system itself; some would view it as un-Islamic and tantamount to founding a new theocratic monarchy – an uncomfortable echo of the 1979 collapse of US-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's government.
Iran's entire recorded history has seen just one prior transition of supreme leaders. That precedent was set in 1989 with the passing of Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the revolution's founding symbol, who died at 86 after guiding Iran through an eight-year war with Iraq. Iran's layered Shiite theocratic structure places the supreme leader at its center, vesting in that office the ultimate authority over every sphere of governance.
That power extends to supreme command of both the conventional military and the Revolutionary Guard – a paramilitary force designated a terrorist organization by the US in 2019 and substantially strengthened under Khamenei's tenure. Spearheading the self-described "Axis of Resistance," a network of terrorist groups and regional partners arrayed across the Middle East against the US and Israel, the Guard also commands vast financial assets and extensive property holdings throughout Iran.
