Who will rule Iran after Ali Khamenei? The question is being asked with increasing frequency and concern as the Supreme Leader approaches his 85th birthday amid rumours of ill health, and it will be raised again on 1 March, when Tehran holds elections to the parliament and the Assembly of Experts, the body which will determine his successor.

Neither of the principal contenders is squeamish about shedding blood in the interests of regime survival

Successions in dictatorships, or in Iran’s case an oppressive theocracy, are fraught with danger. Uncertainty and instability, with the prospect of great violence, are priced in. Throw in an illegal nuclear weapons programme, the growing risk of all-out confrontation with Israel and Tehran’s sponsorship of the ‘axis of resistance’ (or Islamist terrorist groups, take your pick) across the Middle East, and the stakes are extremely high. Add 40 per cent inflation, soaring unemployment and healthcare costs, a housing crisis and a general stampede for the exit, and the sense of crisis only deepens.

Many fear that the next succession, only the second since Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1979 revolution, will see the country tipping into hereditary rule, with Khamenei’s fiftysomething son Mojtaba slipping, serenely or with turbulence, into the top job. For others, President Ebrahim Raisi is the more likely candidate, with former president Hassan Rouhani touted as a third contender.

There are elections and then there are elections. With hardliners in the ascendancy across Iran’s numerous structures of power, few expect the 88-man assembly, whose next term will extend to 2032, to do anything other than approve Khamenei’s preference, whatever that may be. ‘The hardliners have positioned themselves for the transition,’ says Fawaz Gerges, professor of international relations at the London School of Economics. Whoever wins out, the rich and powerful Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps will continue to dominate.

Marie Abdi, an Iranian political researcher, points to Khamenei’s micro-managing political interventions in minor issues such as vaccination, television programming, sports teams and school textbooks as evidence that this is not a man to stand back and let others make key decisions. It is ‘nearly inconceivable’, she wrote in a recent Middle East Institute report, that he would refrain from intervening in the succession, the most critical issue facing the Islamic Republic.

The prevailing view sees the succession as a two-horse race, a straight shoot-out between Raisi and Khamenei Jnr. History suggests that their clerical status, formally insufficient for the leadership position, is little obstacle to attaining power. Certainly it wasn’t in 1989 when Ali Khamenei was appointed, technically illegally since the Islamic Republic’s first constitution stipulated that the Supreme Leader should be a marja-e taqlid, the highest position within the Shiite clergy. Cue a post-hoc constitutional amendment removing that requirement, another session of the Assembly of Experts to formalise Khamenei’s election, and the beginning of 35 years of repressive theocratic rule.

Neither of the principal contenders is squeamish about shedding blood in the interests of regime survival and stability. Raisi earned the infamous sobriquet ‘Butcher of Tehran’ for his involvement in the mass execution of political prisoners in 1988. He showed his steel more recently, too, suppressing protests following the death in police custody in 2022 of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old woman arrested for opposing the mandatory wearing of the hijab.

Mojtaba, a more unknown quantity, operates in the shadows. He has been accused of vote-rigging during the 2009 elections which saw Mahmoud Ahmadinejad win the presidency, of the brutal suppression of anti-government protests which followed those elections, and of embezzling state funds.

Ali Ansari, a professor of Middle East history at St Andrews University, is in little doubt they will attempt to keep the leadership within the family. ‘It’s either Mojtaba or his brother Mustafa. People say this is impossible, it’s a republic, it’s a revolutionary regime, but to be honest, hereditary autocracy is not unusual in Iranian history. The anomaly is the republic.’ Ansari has several thousand years of Iranian history on his side.

The regime has been preparing for this moment for years. ‘For two decades,’ says Ansari, ‘they have been presenting Ali Khamenei as “the Ali of the age” [the Prophet Mohammed’s cousin, son-in-law, short-lived caliph of the Islamic world, and Shia hero bar none]. You’re making a very, very important point if you do that, and you don’t do it unless you’re saying they are preparing for a hereditary succession.’

Not so, says Charlie Gammell, a former Foreign Office official and an Iran expert. ‘One reason it might not be Mojtaba is that Ali Khamenei is wary of falling into the dynastic trap – “we fought a revolution against royalty and their transfer of power from father to son”. Within Shia Islam, the tradition of succession is reserved for the sacred line of the 12 imams.’ Handing power to his son would be a virtually sinful departure from Shia orthodoxy.

It’s quite possible, of course, that Mojtaba, Raisi and Rouhani will all fail to become Iran’s next Supreme Leader. Back in 1989, Ayatollah Hussein-Ali Montazeri, the designated successor, was a shoo-in to replace Khomeini until he fell out with him over the regime’s mass executions in 1988. Khamenei, widely considered a pliant character, snuck in and took the job. A lesser-known cleric may do the same this time. Another, less likely, option is a panel of leaders taking over.

Khamenei is an ailing octogenarian, but we underestimate him at our peril. He successfully battled prostate cancer a decade ago and the growing list of American presidents he has seen off since 1989 now reads: Bush Snr, Clinton, Bush Jnr, Obama, Trump and Biden. Yet it would be a mistake to think a father-son succession would be plain sailing. Recent Middle East history shows many end in disaster. In Iraq, Uday and Qusay Hussein, chief contenders to succeed Saddam, went down fighting during the 2003 war. The Libyan leader Colonel Gaddafi was killed emerging from a sewage pipe during the 2011 revolution before any of his gangster brood, including Khamis, Hannibal, Mutassim and Saif al Islam, could take over. In the same year, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak was ousted before his son Gamal, who had been groomed for the presidency for years, could become the next pharaoh. Only in Syria has Bashar al Assad, son of the late Hafez, been able to cling to power.

A father-son succession would not be plain sailing. Recent Middle East history shows many end in disaster

But perhaps the best example of dynastic succession gone wrong comes from a man whose name, more than 1,300 years after his death, is still reviled by many Iranians. In 656, Muawiya ibn Sufyan, then governor of Syria, refused to pledge allegiance to Ali, plunging the caliphate into civil war. After Ali’s assassination in 661, he seized power and ruled for 20 years before designating his son Yazid as his heir, a hugely controversial decision which turned the caliphate into a hereditary Sunni monarchy and ignited more than a millennium of Shia resentment.

Muawiya, like Khamenei, was the consummate statesman who summarised his political philosophy in a couple of sentences. ‘I do not use my lash where my tongue suffices, nor my sword where my whip is enough. And if there be one hair binding me to my fellow men I do not let it break. If they pull I loosen, and if they loosen I pull.’

Khamenei comes from the same school of statesmanship. ‘He’s very good at shol kon seft kon, weaken and tighten,’ says Gammell. For decades the Supreme Leader, a master of divide and rule, has played off right and left, hardliners and moderates, while retaining ultimate control.

It’s an unlikely prospect but Muawiya’s example may yet give the mullahs in Tehran pause for thought before rubber-stamping any attempt to start a new dynasty. The hard-drinking, pet monkey-keeping Yazid proved an abject failure as caliph; the empire dissolved into chaos and a civil war erupted that lasted a dozen years. They can’t say they weren’t warned.