With Khamenei dead, how will the Islamic Republic choose Iran's next supreme leader?

The death of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei after almost 37 years in power raises crucial questions about Iran's future. 

The contours of a complex succession process began to take shape the morning after Khamenei's killing in an air strike campaign by the United States and Israel.

Read moreAyatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s hardline supreme leader, is dead at 86

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As outlined in its constitution, Iran on Sunday formed a council to assume leadership duties and govern the country.

The council is made up of Iran’s sitting president, the head of the country’s judiciary and a member of the Guardian Council chosen by Iran’s Expediency Council, which advises the supreme leader and settles disputes with parliament.

Iran’s reformist President Masoud Pezeshkian and hardline judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei are its members who will step in and “temporarily assume all the duties of leadership”. 

Though the leadership council will govern in the interim, an 88-member panel called the Assembly of Experts “must, as soon as possible” pick a new supreme leader under Iranian law.

The panel consists entirely of Shiite clerics who are popularly elected every eight years and whose candidacies are approved by the Guardian Council, Iran’s constitutional watchdog.

That body is known for disqualifying candidates in various elections in Iran and the Assembly of Experts is no different. The Guardian Council barred former Iranian president Hassan Rouhani, a relative moderate whose administration struck the 2015 nuclear deal with world powers, from election for the Assembly of Experts in March 2024. 

Ellie Geranmayeh, senior policy fellow and deputy head of the Middle East and North Africa programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told FRANCE 24 that she doubted the succession was going to be a surprise.

"The system learned in June that there was very much a target on Khamenei's back, and that they had put in place several different modes of options for succession depending in what context his death arose," she said.

"What I think will be quite critical in these discussions in terms of the type of figure and ideology that comes with the next supreme leader – if indeed it's actually a figurehead rather than a body that replaces the deceased supreme leader – is going to be whether there is any off-ramp politically that is realistically offered by the United States or not."

She said that the risk that Iran could see the rise of a more hardline figure prepared to cast aside Iran's long-running strategy of "strategic patience" depending in large part on just how far the assault on the Islamic Republic would go.

"In a case where the US and Israel are laser-focused on complete regime collapse, you are going to get a much more confrontational system coming up than what we have potentially seen from rather a timid and calculated Islamic Republic of Iran."

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Behind closed doors

Clerical deliberations about succession and machinations over it take place far from the public eye, making it hard to gauge who may be a top contender. 

Previously, it was thought that Khamenei's protégé, hardline president Ebrahim Raisi, may try to take the mantle. However, he was killed in a May 2024 helicopter crash.

That has left one of Khamenei's sons, Mojtaba, a 56-year-old Shiite cleric, as a potential candidate, though he has never held government office. 

But a father-to-son transfer in the case of a supreme leader could spark anger, not only among Iranians already critical of clerical rule, but also among supporters of the system. Some may see it as un-Islamic and in line with creating a new, religious dynasty after the 1979 collapse of the US-backed Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's government.

There has been only one other transfer of power in the office of supreme leader of Iran, the paramount decision-maker since the country's 1979 Islamic Revolution. 

In 1989, Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini died at age 86 after being the figurehead of the revolution and leading Iran through its eight-year war with Iraq. This transition now comes after Israel launched a 12-day war against Iran in June 2025 as well.

The supreme leader is at the heart of Iran’s complex power-sharing Shiite theocracy and has final say over all matters of state. 

He also serves as the commander-in-chief of the country's military and the powerful Revolutionary Guard, a paramilitary force that the United States designated a terrorist organisation in 2019, and which Khamenei empowered during his rule.

The Guard, which has led the self-described “Axis of Resistance”, a series of militant groups and allies across the Middle East meant to counter the US and Israel, also has extensive wealth and holdings in Iran.

(FRANCE 24 with AP)