Will Khamenei be Iran’s last Supreme Leader?

As Iran’s Supreme Leader sat out his country’s 12-day war with Israel in a Tehran bunker, an intense power struggle has raged above ground. Can Iran’s regime hold? Are the Ayatollah’s days numbered?

Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei delivers a televised speech on Friday. Picture: AP

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In the Orwellian Newspeak of Iran’s deeply-wounded Islamic Republic this week, the regime’s military humiliation at the hands of the Great Satan America and its junior ally Israel was a stunning victory.

Iran emerged “victorious” from its 12-day war with Israel – that killed more than 600 Iranians, decapitated its military command, smashed $US500bn ($763bn) of nuclear infrastructure investment – and “delivered a hard slap to America’s face”, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei said late on Thursday in his first public statement since June 18.

“The American President exaggerated events in unusual ways, and it turned out that he needed this exaggeration,“ the frail Ayatollah said of Donald Trump’s contested claims to have obliterated Iran’s nuclear project with ‘bunker buster’ bombs. The US had “gained nothing from this war”, “did nothing significant” to Iran’s nuclear facilities, and had gravely insulted the Iranian nation by demanding its surrender.

“Such an event will never happen again,” he warned, breaking a prolonged and uncharacteristic silence that in recent days fuelled speculation Iran’s 86-year-old leader might already be dead.

In fundamental ways, survival is victory for the Islamic Republic whose ethos is rooted in the central Shia Islam tenets of resistance and martyrdom. Tuesday’s ceasefire came after Tehran’s carefully-calibrated retaliatory strikes on America’s Al Udeid air base in Qatar, designed to avoid further escalation and allow Iran to fight another day. Both Washington and Doha were warned in advance.

Yet whether the widely-hated regime can survive in its current form now that Israeli and US bombs have exposed the hollowness of its social contract – that the state will provide security in return for restricted personal, political and economic liberties – is being hotly debated. And what of the Ayatollah himself, the wily accidental leader who fell upwards into absolute power through a succession of roles precisely because he was seen to so lack charisma as to present no threat to those above him?

Though his fiery message was clearly aimed at assuring a dwindling support base and cowing mounting critics, it may have come too late to achieve either.

Will Ayatollah Ali Khamenei be Iran’s last Supreme Leader?

As the ageing leader sat out the war in a Tehran bunker, devolving power to a senior council of revolutionary guards, an intense power struggle has raged above ground. Political-military alliances have taken shape according to differing views on Iran’s shattered nuclear program, its feud with Israel, and when – or if – to resume US talks.

Iranian people walk past the symbolic debris of destroyed buildings, which is an anti-war installation at a square in downtown Tehran, this week.

The White House says those talks restart next week. Tehran says it is still deciding whether negotiating is in its interests.

One moderate regime faction, which champions former president Hassan Rouhani for a leadership role, even discussed the idea with counterparts from a major Gulf Country, The Atlantic reported, citing a person involved with those talks. “Everybody knows Khamenei’s days are numbered,” he said.

For tens of millions of Iranians who dream of a freer, more open society, the Supreme Leader’s silence was golden. “In my view, Khamenei’s era is over,” a Tehran-based psychologist who asked not to be named for fear of retribution told The Australian. “Iran society is headed for a major transformation, perhaps even brought about by the Islamic Republic itself. (It) may be forced to undergo foundational changes as a result of these events.”

Supporters of regime change in Iran rally with photos of exiled Iranian opposition leader Reza Pahlavi in Los Angeles this week. Picture: Getty Images

Like millions of fellow Iranians, he fled Tehran for safer provinces as Israeli bombs rained down on the city. But it wasn’t just civilians leaving the capital.

“The military personnel were deserting, they weren’t reporting to their barracks, their families were applying pressure, saying; ‘you’ll die if you go’,” he said, adding families within the regime have also “heavily turned against it”.

“When a foreign state can assassinate top commanders inside the country, it clearly shows structural weaknesses and systemic corruption. That’s what caused the internal collapse. This shouldn’t be seen as a loss of popularity alone – it’s far more severe.”

Crisis Group Iran program director Ali Vaez says he too believes Iran is on the precipice of great change, though cautions it not be what many Iranians hope for.

“There are different ways countries react in the aftermath of conflict and one way is national reconciliation and a government of unity,” he said. “I am not too optimistic about something like that because an 86-year-old leader and his regime feels it is under siege.”

Khamenei is “simultaneously deemed by many of the public and political elite to be the man who brought this catastrophe upon this regime and also the man who saved his regime at a moment of national peril” by punching back at Israel with lethal waves of ballistic missile strikes.

“It’s a mixed picture depending on who you’re asking, but the net result of his leadership after 36 years in power is a country in ruins; an economy in dire straits, a major gap between state and society that seems unbridgeable, and a lot of dissatisfaction with his rule. The Revolutionary Guard, military and even clerical establishment increasingly see him as a liability”.

Many also believe the Supreme Leader system itself, in which an Islamic cleric plays the triple role of spiritual, political and military leader, has made Iran vulnerable to its adversaries. “For that reason it’s quite possible that, whenever the moment of change comes, Ayatollah Khamenei will be the last Supreme Leader of Iran.”

No one yet knows whether Israel’s 12-day Operation Rising Lion and America’s Operation Midnight Hammer, in which the US military dropped 12 ‘bunker buster’ bombs on the heavily fortified Fordow enrichment facility, will hasten reform in Iran or set it back, end Iran’s nuclear ambitions or hasten its race for a bomb. No Middle Eastern leader needs reminding what happened to Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, captured and executed within a few years of relinquishing his regime’s weapons of mass destruction.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made little secret of his hope that Operation Rising Lion, ostensibly aimed at destroying Iran’s nuclear capability, would trigger a popular uprising and the end of the current regime. Mr Trump also indicated some support for that idea on his Truth Social platform, even as he has repeatedly insisted he was not seeking regime change.

US President Donald Trump on Friday. Picture: AP

But, as analyst Karim Sadjadpour noted, military attacks and humiliations have been known both to strengthen dictatorships as well as weaken them. They might expose an authoritarian regime’s weaknesses, but “they rarely create the conditions necessary for lasting democratic change”, Mr Sadjadpour, from the Carnegie Endowment for Peace, wrote in an opinion piece on Thursday for the New York Times.

“Despite most Iranians’ desires to live under a tolerant, representative government that works for their prosperity, authoritarian transitions tend to be brutality contests, not popularity contests. In Iran, it is military men, aspiring Iranian Putins and Sisis and not civilian reformers, who are the best positioned to seize control.”

Some Iranians, fearful of just such a scenario, warned Israel’s strikes may have set back their struggle for reform, pointing to recent concessions in the wake of the deadly crackdown on the massive Woman, Life, Freedom protests of 2022. The regime had allowed Masoud Pezeshkian, a relative moderate, to be elected president, and had largely stopped enforcing the hijab rule and throttling access to the internet.

Change was just around the corner, goes the argument, given Khamenei is 86 and already ailing.

Yet there were no signs the Ayatollah was loosening his grip on political participation to allow a more pluralistic system, says Dr Vaez, who predicts a more militarised regime is the most likely outcome of this month’s conflict.

“I think the majority of Iranians would welcome change after years of suffering but I am sure they will not welcome military rule,” he said. “They want prosperity and freedom and the risk is under current circumstances, if the military takes over, it’s more likely than not to establish a military dictatorship and not necessarily an open system. So it would replace the current theocracy with a military junta which is not necessarily much better.”

But “not necessarily”, he says, because it depends on whether more pragmatic elements of the military takes over, or more ideological ones. Neighbouring Gulf countries, he points out, are not democratic or particularly free, but have managed to bring prosperity to their people. For millions of long-suffering Iranians, that might be seen as an improvement.

Right now, however, the regime’s reflexive reaction to its humiliation at the hands of the US and Israel has been to tighten the screws of state oppression even as its propaganda machine has cranked into overdrive.

More than 700 people had been arrested by early on Thursday on suspicion of acting as Israeli mercenaries, spies and saboteurs since June 13 when Israeli air strikes and targeted assassinations began.

The regime has fast-tracked executions of prisoners condemned to death for allegedly spying for Israel, while Iranians online have reported receiving identical text messages from the crime prevention department of the judiciary, warning them that it is a crime to follow pro-Israel accounts. “Considering that your number has a record linked with the pages of the Zionist regime, you are warned to remove your supportive comments and likes and immediately leave those pages,” the message reads.

Parliament has approved a plan to suspend co-operation with the International Atomic Energy Agency, while Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi and speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf have vowed the nuclear program will be rebuilt faster and stronger.

That prompted the UN nuclear watchdog this week to warn of the potential for a “serious erosion” of a non-proliferation regime that has underpinned international security for more than 50 years.

Everyone wants to know what has happened to Iran’s 400kg of highly-enriched uranium and a potential stockpile of advanced centrifuges. A bruised and humiliated Iranian regime is unlikely to give that away.

For almost four decades Khamenei has staked his country’s future, its economy, its very reason for being, on the twin deterrents of an ever-looming nuclear weapons capacity and an Axis of Resistance which has allowed the regime to project power far beyond its borders. But Israel has all but dismantled that Axis of proxy militia Hamas is on its knees, Hezbollah decapitated, Syria’s al-Assad regime has collapsed and pro-Tehran Yemeni Houthi rebels and Iraqi militia appear reluctant to get involved.

While there is debate about how quickly Iran could resuscitate its nuclear project, there is little doubt Israeli and US strikes have caused substantial damage to decades-worth of investment and military capability, including its arsenal of ballistic missiles.

“Ayatollah Khamenei’s entire investments over the past 36 years have almost evaporated in the course of the past 12 months, and even more in the 12 days of the war with Israel,” Dr Vaez said. “It is ironic but he has kind of ended up exactly where his predecessor was.”

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the father of Iran’s Islamic revolution, faced similar vulnerabilities in 1988 at the end of the Iran-Iraq war which decimated its economy, exhausted its population and left the country internationally isolated. Structural changes were made in the wake of that war; the constitution was revised, the prime minister’s office abolished and power divided up between the offices of the Supreme Leader and president.

The process took 18 months, was unpopular and proved to be an even greater disaster for Iranians. Back then the Islamic Republic was barely a decade old and revolutionary fervour still ran hot. But almost half a century of deprivation, corruption, and endless conflict funded at the expense of the Iranian people’s wellbeing has largely extinguished that zeal.

Amid cracks in the regime, succession plans for the Ayatollah have gone into overdrive with the grandson of Iran’s first Ayatollah reportedly the front runner in deliberations by a three-man committee appointed and overseen by the Supreme Leader himself.

A final decision is then made by the Assembly of Experts, 88 senior clerics who must consider a candidate’s devotion to revolutionary precepts but also which candidate might present a more moderate face to ward off foreign attacks and internal revolts, one insider privy to succession said this week.

With his family pedigree and close alliance with reformists who favour easing social and political restrictions, Hassan Khomeini is thought to be a more palatable choice to many Iranians, certainly more so than Khamenei’s own hard-line son Motjaba who is also in the running.

Victory for Motjaba would destroy the “last scraps of regime legitimacy”, said Dr Vaez, though either way there is no guarantee the next Supreme Leader will wield the same power as Khamenei. “If, more than four decades after the overthrow of the Shah, the regime should come full circle to another dynastic system that would remove the last pillar it stands on.”