Reuters
Michael Rubin, National Interest: The Jockeying Has Begun for Iran’s Post-Khamenei Leadership
It behooves the United States to plan for post-Khamenei Tehran.
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is now eighty-one years old. While his health remains a closely guarded secret, his past medical history, age, and the deaths in recent years of other senior leaders have led Iranians to start considering what a post-Khamenei Islamic Republic might look like.
There are two main contenders to succeed Khamenei: Khamenei’s fifty-one-year-old son, Mojtaba, and Judiciary Chief Ebrahim Raisi. Neither can campaign openly but the nature of the Iranian system is that the Assembly of Experts, the institutional power center which officially promotes the next supreme leader is a rubber-stamp body, and so the informal campaign is more important than the formal.
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WNU Editor: Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei is eighty-one, and he does have a history of serious health problems. But if his fifty-one-year-old son takes power, it would set a precedent of a family dynasty that I do not think will sit well with most Iranians.
