An offhand remark by Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in a November 11, 2025, speech before parliament revealed the depth of regime’s internal problems and the possibility of chaos once 86-year-old Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei dies.
Pezeshkian called Khamenei “the pillar of this tent” and added that differences within the regime are only possible because Khamenei acts as a referee. “When the war was happening … I had no fear of what might happen,” he said, “but I was scared that, if something happened to [Khamenei], we would fight each other; Israel would not even need to do anything.”
“I was scared that, if something happened to [Khamenei], we would fight each other; Israel would not even need to do anything.”
Khamenei was the president when the first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, died without an heir apparent. Before the 1989 constitutional amendments, the Islamic Republic also had a prime minister, who was chief executive, making the presidency even less critical than it is today. He had a thin scholarly résumé and was a side actor. Khomeini’s eldest son, Ahmad, and Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani conducted the search for a replacement. One idea was a council of leaders, but they eventually settled on Khamenei. Iranian factional leaders perceived him to be a buffoon and believed they could control him.
Six years later, the younger Khomeini died at 49 under mysterious circumstances. After the 2009 Green Movement, Rafsanjani was sidelined. He died in 2017; his daughter believes authorities may have murdered him.
Khamenei spent the first two decades of his leadership creating rival institutions to make his regime coup-proof, as Nizam al-Mulk prescribed a millennium earlier in Siyasatnameh, or Book of Politics. He has rotated power between factions and created divisions within institutions. Hardline clerics oversee the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the paramilitary Basij. The Revolutionary Guard is also rife with divisions. Base commanders who are closer to the people are unhappy with increased violence and poverty, while those in strategic commands favor greater repression. Base commanders, many of them veterans of the Iran-Iraq War, resent more influential strategic commanders.
All former presidents and most former speakers of the parliament are now in political exile, and the regime leadership has even slapped some with official sanctions. This includes hardliners like President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is under a media and travel ban; Ali-Akbar Nategh-Nouri, who has faded into obscurity; and Ali Larijani, who was prevented from running for president last year but regained prominence after demonstrating loyalty during the war.
Ideologically, the Islamic Republic has failed to make good on its three revolutionary promises: Iran is more corrupt and impoverished than it was under the shah. Mosques have become empty, and the increasingly secular youth public violates Islamic orthodoxy. Both the 2020 killing of Qods Force chief Qassem Soleimani and the June 2025 Twelve-Day War with Israel show strategic weakness.
It is obvious to the Iranian people, including regime backers, that the current structure is unsustainable. Pezeshkian is right that only Khamenei keeps peace within the regime.
For most factions, the process that led to Khamenei’s leadership is a cautionary tale and not a playbook to be repeated. Each understands that elevating a single person as the country’s absolute ruler will mean that they will be sidelined for decades to come.
For most factions, the process that led to Khamenei’s leadership is a cautionary tale and not a playbook to be repeated.
The likeliest case is that a council will succeed Khamenei and govern as a coalition. But Iran is not a parliamentary democracy. Members will conspire against each other and try to empower their own bases. Even if a single man becomes the supreme leader, actors will try to undermine him to deny him absolute power. If Khamenei is the glue, then different factions will have turpentine ready to prevent his successor from sticking or even holding together.
The Iranian people matter. They view the regime, in any form, as irredeemable. Khamenei’s death will encourage them to take to the streets more often. Reformists will lean on protestors to regain their influence, while some within the security forces might even try to protect these theocrat-lite factions from suppressive forces.
A recent GAMAAN survey asked which political figures and regime types Iranians support, and nobody received more than 31 percent support. The only proposition with majority support was a negative one: 70 percent opposed the Islamic Republic.
If there is no unifying principle nor person around which Iranians can rally, the state will come apart with no transition plan or authority ready to replace it. This disintegration likely will result in anarchy and civil war. In a worst-case scenario, disintegration of a country of more than 90 million people would be uncontainable and would cause a greater shock to the international system than most events since World War II.
