After Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s death, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps pushed hard for the Assembly of Experts to immediately anoint his son Mojtaba Khamenei as successor. They first argued that the appointment needed to be an extra-constitutional one, bypassing the Assembly of Experts entirely. There was chaos in the process, compounded by the destruction of the Assembly office in the holy city of Qom by Israeli bombing; proceedings had to move online. Some Assembly members pushed back, noting the hereditary, monarchy-like nature of such an appointment. After a week, the result was announced. Of the members who participated – the quorum of two-thirds being met – some 85 per cent voted for Mojtaba Khamenei. Not unanimity, but well above the required threshold. That it took a week to get sufficient members in line tells its own story.

According to scholar Karim Sadjadpour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the regime sought a supreme leader who would be palatable to the Revolutionary Guards and the senior clergy, and who had public name recognition. Mojtaba Khamenei possessed all three attributes.

The death of Ali Khamenei after 37 years in power and his replacement by his son, exposes the deeper architecture of power in Iran, and the longstanding political institutions that continue to structure and constrain power beyond any single leader. To understand how this outcome was produced –  and why it was nearly inevitable –  requires an understanding of Iran’s core political institutions

Iran’s Unique Mixture of Political Institutions

Iran constitutionally is a mixture of religious-based political institutions and standard democratic ones.  Regarding the latter, it holds regular elections for its president (four-year terms, with a two-term limit) and parliament (every four years, separate from the president). Until 1989, there was also a prime minister who shared executive power with the president.

In these elections, competition has traditionally been basically though not perfectly fair—the key exception being the 2009 presidential election in which the incumbent won fraudulently.  Indeed, reformist or reformist-leaning candidates won the presidency in 1997 and 2001 (Mohammad Khatami), 2017 (Hassan Rouhani in his re-election, after running from the centre in 2013), and 2024 (Masoud Pezeshkian, the current president).  All-candidate debates have also been the norm in presidential elections since 2009.  

However, Iran is no democracy.  This is because of the greater role of unaccountable religious-based political institutions, and because its elections are unfree. (In terms of presidential elections, this lack of freedom was especially the case in 2021.)

Early on the supremacy of the religious-based institutions was established via a conflict between the leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and President Abolhassan Banisadr. In 1980, Banisadr became the first president within the Islamic Republic, winning over three-quarters of the vote. In 1981, amidst  a power struggle with religious hardliners, Banisadr sought a referendum to let Iranians choose between democracy and theocracy.  However, the conservative parliament voted to impeach him, a move backed by Khomeini, who followed this with a months-long“reign of terror”, in which thousands of regime opponents were executed. 

In Iran the most powerful political position—and the first of its three religious-based political institutions—is the vali-ye faqih or “ruling jurist”,........

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