Mojtaba Khamenei has been named as Iran’s new supreme leader just over a week after his father, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, was killed in U.S.-Israeli strikes.
A statement from the Assembly of Experts — the panel of Shia clerics responsible under Iranian law for choosing the country’s top leader — said Mojtaba Khamenei had been selected as the third leader of the Islamic Republic, according to reports from IRIB state TV and the Fars, Tasnim and ISNA news agencies.
President Donald Trump told Axios last week that the choice would be “unacceptable” and suggested he wanted to handpick a new supreme leader, a process usually overseen by Iran’s clerics.
“They are wasting their time. Khamenei’s son is a lightweight. I have to be involved in the appointment,” he said. “Khamenei’s son is unacceptable to me.”
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Trump repeated this sentiment in an ABC News interview, saying the new leader “is not going to last long” if Iranian leaders do not get his approval.
The Israel Defense Forces warned on Sunday that any successor to Ali Khamenei would be considered a target.
The semiofficial Mehr News Agency confirmed last week that Khamenei’s son was alive and well after the deadly strikes launched by the United States and Israel that killed his father and other family members, including Mojtaba Khamenei’s wife.
Mehr reported that Mojtaba Khamenei was “overseeing matters related to the martyrs of the family, managing affairs, and providing consultation and review on important national issues.”
Mojtaba Khamenei, a politician and cleric, is known to hold significant influence among the administrators and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. But he is not particularly popular in Iran, with father-to-son succession also being frowned upon in the country, particularly after the toppling of the U.S.-backed monarchy of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi in 1979.
He also lacks the religious credentials of his father to lead a clerical regime, which claims to represent God’s will on Earth.
“Most Iranians had been hoping for a transition to a system of governance not led by an Islamic cleric, but rather by a president and a council of ministers, preceded, of course, by, you know, a referendum,” said Valentine Moghadam, a professor of sociology and international affairs at Northeastern University in Boston, speaking ahead of the appointment.
“But that seems to have been made impossible because of the recent assault by Israel and the United States,” she said.
Questions around who will succeed Khamenei have been complicated by the death of Iran’s then-President Ebrahim Raisi, long thought of as a possible successor, in a helicopter crash in May 2024.
But the regime will be keen to show Israel, the U.S. and the Iranian people that it isn’t collapsing, Javed Ali, a former senior counterterrorism official and now an associate professor at the University of Michigan, said ahead of the appointment.
“By picking the next supreme leader, that obviously is a signal,” he added.
Aniseh Bassiri Tabrizi, an associate fellow at Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa program, said ahead of the appointment that “the signal that such a nomination will give is that nothing will change.”
Despite what little support there might be for Iran’s new supreme leader, without regime change in Iran, they would presumably maintain the same “iron grip on control through the institutions of power,” Ali said.
“The next supreme leader will step into that same system,” he added.
The Assembly of Experts last convened to select a new leader in 1989, when they chose Ali Khamenei. The new leader is required to be a man and must be an Islamic cleric under Iranian law.
Mojtaba Khamenei’s appointment as the supreme leader makes him an immediate target, with Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz warning Wednesday that any new leader would become “an unequivocal target for elimination.”
He emphasized that Israel and the U.S. would work together “to crush the regime’s capabilities and create conditions for the Iranian people to overthrow and replace it.”