Who is Mojtaba Khamenei? 7 things to know about Iran’s likely next leader
1. Widely seen as a hardliner
Mojtaba Khamenei comes from the hardline faction and may continue a strict political line. He “would likely opt for an even more hard-line direction as supreme leader,” reports The Wall Street Journal, citing Iranian officials and analysts familiar with the matter. One Iranian official called him “much tougher than his father.”
The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace links Mojtaba Khamenei to the regime’s response to the 2009 Green Movement protests, noting that he worked closely with the Basij paramilitary forces to help his father suppress demonstrators. Those protests, which erupted after the disputed 2009 presidential election, became the largest political challenge to the Islamic Republic since the revolution and were eventually crushed by security forces.
The Journal also quotes Saeid Golkar, an expert on Iran’s security services at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, who said that if Mojtaba takes power, “He will take his father’s revenge against both Iranian society as well as Israel and the United States.”
His foreign policy outlook would probably be confrontational toward Iran’s external adversaries. Several reports describe him as deeply hostile to the United States and Israel and closely connected to the institutions that shape Iran’s regional military posture. Choosing Mojtaba Khamenei as supreme leader would signal escalation rather than compromise.
The larger institutional environment reinforces this outcome. Carnegie explains that before his death, Ali Khamenei ensured that key political institutions were dominated by hardliners. Through the Guardian Council, he disqualified hundreds of candidates from the Assembly of Experts elections in March 2024, many of them moderates or reformists. Because the Assembly of Experts chooses the supreme leader, that composition makes the selection of a reformist or moderate figure highly unlikely.
