Every analyst who spent years modelling Iran’s succession scenario got the same part wrong. They obsessed over the top seat — who would replace Khamenei, whether the next Supreme Leader would be a moderate or a hardliner, whether a reformer might slip through in the chaos. That framing was always too narrow. The real crisis is not at the apex of Iran’s clerical pyramid. It is in the middle — where the next generation of senior clerics was supposed to be waiting and, according to Reuters and other reporting, is no longer there.
The Mid-Level Clerical Class Has Been Systematically Hollowed Out
Iran’s political system was designed with redundancy in mind. The Supreme Leader is the pinnacle, but beneath him sits an entire architecture of senior clerical authorities — ayatollahs with independent religious followings, moderate theologians who can adjudicate disputes, figures who carry legitimacy beyond the security apparatus. Over three decades, that layer was quietly and methodically dismantled.
The process accelerated after each protest cycle. The 2009 Green Movement purged reformist clerics from positions of influence. The 2019 fuel protests, which killed over 1,500 people according to Reuters, resulted in a further tightening of the clerical establishment. The mass protests of 2022, triggered by Mahsa Amini’s death in police custody, effectively ended what Reuters described as the once-vibrant reformist movement within Iranian politics. Foreign Policy documented how, in the run-up to the 2026 conflict, the regime arrested prominent opposition figures including Azar Mansouri and Hossein Karroubi — leaders of the reformist political infrastructure that might otherwise have produced credible clerical voices in a succession process.
What remains in the middle tier of Iran’s clerical class is not a bench of qualified, independently respected religious scholars. It is a curated group of loyalists — men whose advancement was contingent on demonstrating allegiance to Khamenei and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. When the question of succession arose, the Assembly of Experts did not choose from a diverse pool of candidates. They confirmed a choice already made by the IRGC, because the alternative pool had been methodically eliminated.
The Assembly of Experts Is a Rubber Stamp, Not a Council
Iran’s constitution grants the 88-member Assembly of Experts the power to select, supervise, and remove the Supreme Leader. On paper, this represents meaningful institutional checks on theocratic power. In practice, every candidate for Assembly membership is vetted by the Guardian Council — itself an unelected body of senior clerics and jurists appointed by the Supreme Leader. The result is a circularity that ensures the Assembly selects from a pre-screened pool of loyalists, then ratifies the choice that the security establishment has already made.
Reuters reported that the IRGC applied direct pressure on Assembly members to back Mojtaba Khamenei’s appointment in the days following his father’s death. The Atlantic noted that the constitutional question of whether Iran’s legitimacy is institutional or personal has never been genuinely tested, because the institution was designed to prevent the test from occurring. Mojtaba received the title of ayatollah only in 2022 — barely meeting the minimum clerical qualification for the position he now holds. Al Jazeera noted he has never held elected office and that most Iranians have never heard him speak publicly.
This is not a succession that reflects the depth of Iran’s clerical establishment. It reflects its shallowness. The vacuum is not at the top of the pyramid — it is in all the layers below it that were supposed to give the system legitimacy and flexibility.
Why This Was Never Predicted
Western analysts consistently misread the nature of the threat to Iran’s clerical system. They focused on external shocks — US sanctions, Israeli military pressure — and on the top leadership. They modelled succession as a question of which figure would consolidate power. They did not sufficiently track the internal purges that were quietly removing the human infrastructure of independent clerical authority.
The Brookings Institution noted in early 2026 that China, observing Iran’s political system, characterized the regime as having built-in resilience by dispersing authority across multiple institutions. That analysis was accurate for the security and military apparatus. It was not accurate for the clerical class. The IRGC dispersed authority within its own institutional network. The clerical establishment did the opposite — it concentrated authority around loyalists and eliminated diversity of religious voice.
The result is a succession that fills the top seat but leaves the middle empty. There are no credible mid-level clerics positioned to arbitrate future disputes within the system, to provide Islamic legitimacy to policy decisions independent of the IRGC, or to offer an alternative centre of gravity if the security apparatus fractures under continued military pressure. What looks like a successful succession from the outside is actually an exposure of how thin the regime’s clerical bench truly is.
What This Actually Means
The gap at the middle of Iran’s clerical establishment matters for reasons that go beyond theology. In a functioning theocratic system, mid-level religious authorities serve as shock absorbers — they provide mechanisms for internal dispute resolution, they give the system flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances, and they maintain the fiction that governance is rooted in Islamic jurisprudence rather than military control.
Without that layer, any future internal crisis — a military defeat, an economic collapse, a popular uprising — will have no clerical infrastructure to contain it. The system will have to rely entirely on the security apparatus. That makes the regime simultaneously harder and more brittle: harder in the sense that it will respond to any challenge with pure coercion, more brittle in the sense that it has eliminated the absorptive mechanisms that allow political systems to bend without breaking.
Western analysts predicted a succession crisis at the top of Iran’s pyramid. The real crisis is the one nobody named: the hollowing out of everything that was supposed to hold the pyramid up from beneath. News.az and CNN reported the selection of a new Supreme Leader. The deeper story — reported across Reuters, Foreign Policy, and Al Jazeera — is what was not there when the selection had to be made.
Sources
- Reuters — Khamenei Killing Shatters Iran’s Order
- Foreign Policy — Iran’s Post-Massacre Purge Against Reformists
- Al Jazeera — Who Is Mojtaba Khamenei?
- Reuters — Iran’s Unrest Sounds Death Knell for Reformists
- Brookings — How China Is Positioning Itself
- The Atlantic — The Death of Khamenei and the End of an Era
- news.az — Iran Selected a New Supreme Leader