Ill-Health: An Excuse to Choose a Successor?

Rooz Online

Ayatollah Khamenei’s surgery this week that came a week after the 16th gathering of the Experts Assembly on Leadership may indicate to the assembly members that they need to be doing what one of their peers has suggested just a few weeks ago.

Similarly, this may indicate why during the last Assembly meeting no elections took place for its leadership. Iran’s leader ayatollah Khamenei went to hospital just a week after meeting the Assembly members.

Earlier in April, Gorban-Ali Dori Najafabadi, the deputy chairman of the Experts Assembly that is constitutionally tasked to select the supreme leader of Iran, had said, “… we must be thinking about the days after him (ayatollah Khamenei).” He mentioned how “smooth” the last transition from ayatollah Khomeini to ayatollah Khamenei had been, something that had been “easily accepted by all social strata.”

Ayatollah Khamenei is 75 years old. By the end of the fifth session of the Assembly he will be about 84 years old, an age that may force the Assembly members to think about his successor.

After this week’s surgery, Khamenei’s doctor Ali-Reza Marandi said that the ayatollah had to reduce his work in the coming weeks and “stop some of them altogether.”

According to article 111 of Iran’s constitution, whenever the supreme leader is not able to perform his duties because of an illness or some other issue “a council made up of the president, the head of the judiciary and a cleric member of the Guardian Council as selected by the State Expediency Council shall perform the leader’s responsibilities.” The implementation of this provision would mean that the helm of the country would fall in to the hands president Hassan Rouhani, head of the judiciary Sadegh Larijani and a cleric member from the Guardian Council, probably Ahmad Jannati.

The hardline principlist faction in Iran’s political spectrum has been against fresh elections in the Assembly of Experts to choose a new leadership. Their opposition is understandable. They wish to first ensure that the assembly is made up of individuals that will support their goals. They have specifically said that “undesirable” elements in the current assembly will be dealt with.

Even a member of the Guardian Council had said last month that not all of the current members of the Assembly are viewed to be qualified to run again. Mohammad Momen is reported to have had Ali Mohammad Dastgeib in mind. This representative from Shiraz had in the past supported Mir-Hossein Mousavi’s bid for the presidency in 2009, something that brought him much criticism and attacks. There were rumors that he had resigned from the Assembly of Experts, something that he denied and added that he had not attended the last meeting of the assembly because he had not been formally invited to it.

While today it is not clear who will succeed ayatollah Khamenei should he not be able to do his job as supreme leader, there are those who support his son, Mojtaba Khamenei to take the helm. They have argued that Mojtaba has already built himself a power base and that he has in fact even exercised this.

It was Mehdi Karoubi who after the 2005 presidential elections revealed the role that Mojtaba had played in a letter to ayatollah Khamenei. Karoubi criticized the son’s interference in the electoral process. Others followed suit. Mojtaba Vahedi – Karoubi’s advisor, Mohammad Noorizad and Mostaba Tajzadeh also spoke of the growing influence of Mojtaba in Khamenei’s office. The problem of course is that Mojtaba lacks the clerical qualifications that a supreme leader is required to possess, by which the Assembly of Experts decides.

There had also been reports or rumors in the past that ayatollah Hashemi Shahrudi, the former head of Iran’s judiciary, would succeed Khamenei. While the workings of the Assembly are kept secret, observers doubt that the Revolutionary Guards which have acquired unprecedented influence and say in Iran’s affairs will let the Assembly to independently make a decision on who shall be the boss in the future.