Who will be Iran's next leader?

0:00When NPR caught up with a woman named Shadi in Tehran, she was hoarse. Last night, we screamed so hard from the windows that I don't have a voice anymore, she said.

0:15I screamed, Hamani is killed, she said. I was shouting from the bottom of my heart, from the depths of my diaphragm. Shadi asked not to be identified by her full name because she was worried she could be arrested by Iran's regime for speaking to the Western media. And that gets to a complication of this moment after the killing of Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, during the U.S.-Israeli airstrike campaign. Many people are relieved or exhilarated that the Ayatollah is dead, but the regime he led is still very much intact. This is not a personalized dictatorship. This is an ideological system with a multilayered cadre.

0:54That's Ray Take, senior fellow for Middle East Studies the Council on Foreign Relations. I think you can engage in decapitation exercises, as was done in this particular strike, but the regime is resilient enough to be able to replace depleted cadres. And sure enough, on Sunday, barely 24 hours after Khamenei's death, a spokesperson for Iran's foreign ministry told NPR that Iran would soon have a new leader. Here's Ismail Bagayi. The Council of Experts should elect the new supreme leader. We hope that that would be done within the next few days, I hope. There is no guarantee a new leader would be any better for the people of Iran than the last one, as President Trump acknowledged in the Oval Office on Tuesday.

1:42I guess the worst case would be we do this and then somebody takes over who's as bad as the previous person, right? That could happen. Consider this. The future of Iran hangs on an important question. Who will be its next leader? We will look at how succession could unfold.

2:03From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow.

2:13It's Consider This from NPR. As you may know, the United States has a detailed line of succession in case the president dies in office. starting with the vice president all the way down to the most recently created cabinet position, the Department of Homeland Security secretary. Iran's constitution lays out its own process for replacing a supreme leader. To talk through how it could play out as bombs continue to fall on the country, I called up Mirzad Borugherdi, a scholar at Missouri University of Science and Technology who has studied Iran's ruling class for decades. Let's start just so we can understand how this would work in normal times.

2:50In Iran, citizens vote in elections for parliament and president, but ultimately power rests with the supreme leader. How is the supreme leader normally chosen? Right.

2:59Ruth Sherlock:So the supreme leader is the focal point of Iranian politics. And theoretically, based on the constitution, he is supposed to be approved by an 88th member of Assembly of Religious Experts. And these are mainly sort of elderly folks in Iran. The joke in Iran is when you ask, what is the average age of members of religious experts? people say deceased. The oldest member of that council presently is 98 years old. These folks are supposed to be deciding who the next supreme leader is. Just this morning, we got news that Israeli and American bombs have destroyed the headquarters of this assembly in the holy city of Qom.

3:40Ruth Sherlock:So we are not quite clear as to how this assembly is going to meet. Would they be voting online? Whether Ayatollah Khamenei had made any recommendation to them that was not made public. So this is really the most serious crisis of succession, considering the fact that they have to make a decision during wartime with this type of challenges in front of them. Many of them seem to be being targeted by U.S. and Israeli military actions. So it seems like the basic premise here of getting together to talk and meet seems incredibly difficult. Correct. We've been talking about the Assembly of Experts.

4:19I want to talk about another power setter in Iran, and that is the Revolutionary Guard Corps. What are you seeing? What are you thinking about what their role is in this moment, given this massive power vacuum and given the instability in the country? Yes.

4:32Ruth Sherlock:So the Revolutionary Guard really is the body that must deal with any potential unrest sparked by Ayatollah Khamenei's death. the whole succession interlude that we are witnessing right now, and any eventual consolidation that must take place. This is assuming that the regime survives. This is also the body that is going to be losing the most. There is a phenomenon of officer's economy in Iran. These folks have benefited handsomely from sanction busting. And so the question right now is that how will they deal with the next supreme leader chosen by that assembly of experts? Will they exercise veto power if whoever is chosen is not to their liking?

5:17Ruth Sherlock:Or if this person is chosen, will they really maintain agenda-setting power and basically telling an unexperienced newbie how he should be conducting himself as the next supreme leader? So, yes, IRGC or the Revolutionary Guard is really the force to look at this critical moment. What do we know about the most likely contenders for the role of supreme leader and what do we need to know about them in terms of what their leadership could mean for the future of Iran? Right. So, again, because of the opaque process of selecting a leader, this is all guessing on our part. I will mention three individuals that are on my radar.

6:03Ruth Sherlock:One is, of course, the son of Ayatollah Khamenei, who, you know, is sort of the ultimate insider for the job, but he has not really held any type of official elected or appointed offices. And because of his junior standing in the clerical hierarchy, his selection will also rattle the rank and files of the clerical and political class. The second individual is a member who was very much favored by Ayatollah Khamenei by the name of Ali Reza Erafi. This guy was given entrusted with important positions including being in charge of all the religious seminaries in the country, which is of course a rather important political and clerical task.

6:51Ruth Sherlock:He is also currently a member of that three-member council that are supposed to be taking care of issues confronting the country until the next supreme leader is chosen. And finally, I would say a former head of the judiciary, a gentleman by the name Ayatollah Sadegh Larijani. He comes from a well-established family and therefore his brother also currently is the national security advisor. So he has, you know, the sort of the pedigree in terms of his religious standing, et cetera, and family connections, ties to the clerical establishment that might make him a suitable candidate. You said at one point if the regime survives, there is this tremendous military pressure being put on Iran right now.

7:40Walk us through what it would take for the regime to actually collapse in Iran.

7:45Ruth Sherlock:Yeah, I think, you know, we need to keep in mind that Iran really was not a one-bullet state. We see that even after the demise of the Supreme Leader and many of the high military officials, the country is still continuing. They're firing missiles, etc. Law and order is still more or less there, and it hasn't collapsed yet. I think we have to keep in mind that for a regime to collapse, you need to have a serious opposition force that is able to play the role of a rival government and take over, etc. At this moment, as we speak, there is really no organized opposition inside the country. No part of the Iranian territory is under the control of an opposition force.

8:31Ruth Sherlock:And even though there is general popular discontent, this is not organized or sustained the opposition has been very episodic over the last 40 years. That's interesting. For all of the widespread protests that we have seen rise up again and again, a clear opposition group has not been able to form. That's right. You know, the son of the former Shah, you know, has a lot of sympathy both outside and, you know, inside the country. He has, you know, of course, a symbolic capital as the inheritor of that thousands of years of monarchy in Iran. But at least so far, we have not really seen that he has the organizational muscle to be able to change the facts on the ground or try to unify the opposition.

9:19Ruth Sherlock:So that seems to be a liability. Furthermore, there are concerns as to whether we might see more or less a repeat of the Venezuelan scenario, meaning the Trump administration reaching to one of those members of the Revolutionary Guards, etc., and trying to come to terms rather than, you know, see the country really go into a chaos considering that it's a country of 90 million people and geographically larger than Iraq and Afghanistan combined. That is Mirzad Borudjerdi, the co-author of Post-Revolutionary Iran, a Political Handbook, and Vice Provost and Dean of the College of Arts, Sciences, and Education at Missouri S &T.

10:02Thank you so much for helping us understand all of this.

10:04Ruth Sherlock:Thanks for having me. This episode contained reporting from NPR's Ruth Sherlock. It was produced by Connor Donovan with audio engineering by Becky Brown. It was edited by Courtney Dorning. And our executive producer is Sammy Yannigan.

10:23It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow. Want to hear this podcast without sponsor breaks? Amazon Prime members can listen to Consider This sponsor-free through Amazon Music. Or you can also support NPR's vital journalism and get Consider This Plus at plus.npr.org. That's plus.npr.org.