Who Will Become the Next Supreme Leader of Iran?

0:00Today on State of the World, who will become the next supreme leader of Iran? You're listening to State of the World from NPR. We bring you the day's most vital international stories up close where they're happening. I'm Greg Dixon. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei is 86 years old and has held the position for 36 years. His political power is weakened now following the loss of allies in the region and the 12-day war with Israel, a war in which he was thought to be a potential Israeli target during the conflict. NPR's Jackie Northam looks at who, or what, could replace Khamenei upon his death.

0:44There has only been one previous time when Iran went through a process of naming a new supreme leader. That was in 1989, when Ayatollah Khamenei was chosen to succeed Ayatollah Khomeini, the towering figurehead behind the Islamic Revolution. Now, nearly four decades on, that process is once again unfolding. Everything in Iran in the past four or five years has really been about succession. Vali Nasser, an Iran expert at Johns Hopkins University, says Khamenei has periodically handed names of potential successors to the so-called Council of Experts, a group of roughly 80 clerics who decide the next leader.

1:22Nasser says after the recent war with Israel and the U.S. bombing of key Iranian nuclear sites, the selection has become more urgent. I think in the interest of preservation of the state and ensuring its continuity, he created contingency plans to make a transfer of power much more smooth and quick. Speculation who may succeed Khamenei veers from his son Mojtaba to a grandson of Ayatollah Khomeini and to past reform-minded presidents. Afshan Ostevar, an Iran expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, says Khamenei has good reasons not to tip his hand as to who will succeed him.

2:05One, Khamenei is going to lose status because he's going to have a successor, but also that successor is going to be a target for political attacks by his opponents, right? And so the longer that successor is known, the longer opponents are going to have to sort of tarnish his brand. Ostevar says a successor will have to be a cleric. If you didn't have a cleric succeeding Khamenei, you would no longer have an Islamic revolution. You'd no longer have an Islamic republic. I mean, it would be a completely different system. But Ali Vyaz, who heads up the Iran project at the International Crisis Group, disagrees.

2:40He says Iran has suffered deep setbacks under Khamenei. The economy is battered. there's serious discontent in society, it's lost key proxies in the region, and its military was decimated by Israel. Valles says the Revolutionary Guards may see this as an opportunity for change. It is quite possible that Ayatollah Khamenei was the last supreme leader of Iran. That going forward, it is hard to imagine that the military, the Revolutionary Guards, which has paid the highest price for Ayatollah Khamenei's strategic mistakes, would continue seeing the clerical establishment as an asset and not as a liability.

3:21Whoever that successor is, the question becomes what kind of leader, what qualifications and character does he, and it undoubtedly will be a he, have to have. Ostevar says he will likely be seen as weak. Weak because none of the institutions of power within the Islamic Republic already are going to want to just hand over the kingdom to somebody who's going to become a dictator, right? So the more powerful a person is, the more influence they have. A weaker a person is, the more influence that all the factions can potentially exercise over that person. Khamenei himself was seen as weak when he was named Supreme Leader.

3:58Johns Hopkins Nasser says he was also cunning and aligned himself with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, a dominant, multi-pronged military force. Nasser says for all practical purposes, the Revolutionary Guards are already running the country. They are in the government, they control media, they control vast areas of the economy, they are in the decision-making circles. In a way, they are operating the way the Egyptian or the Pakistani military operate behind the civilian facade. But Nasser says there's a realization among many power brokers that things have to change, that Iran's virulent anti-West stance has hit its limit.

4:38And there is powerful voices that are not saying we should tomorrow morning become absolute friends of the West. But basically they're saying we should end the war with the West. We should go down the path of de-escalation and after de-escalation will come normalization. But how Khamenei dies could also affect the decision about who next runs Iran. If he dies naturally, Nasser says a moderate could be supreme leader. If Khamenei is assassinated, most likely a hardline cleric will take control. Jackie Northam, NPR News.

5:18That's the State of the World from NPR. Thanks for listening.