While Western reports confirm the deteriorating health of the mullahs’ leader, Ali Khamenei, the question arises once more regarding who will succeed him in the most prominent position in Iran?
Khamenei, 83, has been suffering from cancer for years and underwent surgery in 2014. There has been recent news that he is on his deathbed, which adds a new crisis to the list of crises facing the Tehran regime, especially with no official successor being named. him yet.
During the past years, many personalities were proposed to succeed Khamenei, but some of them died, such as Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi, who died in 2018, and others, such as Sadiq Larijani, head of the Expediency Council, were excluded because of his positions on preventing his brother Ali Larijani from participating in the 2021 presidential elections.
In a report by the Iranian Farda website, assuming that nothing special happened in Iran until Khamenei’s death, and the political conditions remained as they are now, his second son, Mojtaba Khamenei, is the most prominent candidate to succeed him. Others nominate the current president, Ibrahim Raisi, for the post of guide. The choice of the leader, according to Iran’s constitution, is due to the so-called Assembly of Experts, consisting of 88 clerics with the rank of “mujtahid.”
Perhaps what enhances Mojtaba Khamenei’s chances of being the supreme leader is what was reported by official media close to the regime, to present the son of the leader as a “mujtahid” in the recent period, and to call him “Ayatollah”. The son controls the largest economic institutions that make up 60% of the country’s economy, and enjoys wide influence in the security and military sectors, especially with the Revolutionary Guards. And he has an intelligence and security organization that has largely marginalized the government’s Intelligence Ministry in the past 13 years. However, the road is not entirely clear for Mujtaba to succeed his father, as there are obstacles that can prevent this, most notably: the absence of administrative and official experience in the state, and that his succession may be met with a refusal to bequeath.