Ali Larijani is an increasingly plausible heir in Iran

Formally, iran has a leadership council primed to act should the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, be killed or incapacitated. Under Article 111 of the constitution, the president, the head of the judiciary and a senior cleric would form a caretaker committee. In practice, one man already seems to outrank them. Ali Larijani, secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, is shaping Iran’s strategy as the supreme leader slips in and out of view. “He’s replaced Qassem Suleimani,” says Lynette Nusbacher, a British former intelligence officer, referring to the regime’s leading commander whom America assassinated in 2020. “He’s Khamenei’s eminence grise.”

The constitution allows the supreme leader to delegate his powers to others. In recent years Mr Larijani, rather than the president, Masoud Pezeshkian, has represented Mr Khamenei in dealings with Russia, China and the Arab monarchies of the Gulf states. Before a recent round of negotiations with America, Mr Larijani travelled to Oman to set the regime’s terms. After the failure of Hizbullah, a militia backed by Iran in Lebanon, and other Shia proxies to deter Israel, Mr Khamenei again turned to Mr Larijani—telling a civilian, not the head of the Quds Force, the external arm of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (irgc), to manage relations with Lebanon and Yemen. Many read it as a rebuke to the generals. He played such a key role in the January massacres that the Trump administration put him under sanctions by name.

Few can match his reach across the regime. A professor of philosophy—his academic speciality is Immanuel Kant—and a qualified mathematician, he is also steeped in clerical lineage. His father was an ayatollah; his father-in-law was the Islamic revolution’s leading theoretician and right-hand of the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ruhollah Khomeini; his brother Sadeq Larijani, another turbaned official, ran the judiciary for a decade. The man himself has occasionally led Friday prayers in Mr Khamenei’s stead. He served in the irgc, held four ministerial posts and spent 12 years as speaker of parliament.

He casts himself as a loyal but pragmatic conservative. He claims that during last summer’s war an Israeli phoned to give him 12 hours to leave Iran to avoid assassination and that he hung up.

Yet ambition flickers; he has thrice sought the presidency and may yet hold real presidential powers, unlike the subservient Mr Pezeshkian. Some think Mr Larijani’s sights are set higher still. The Islamic Republic has shed much of its clerical garb; even Mr Khamenei now prefers the secular-sounding “supreme leader” to “imam”. A successor in a business suit is no longer unthinkable. “It’s a wild card,” says Ms Nusbacher.

Could Mr Larijani change the regime’s course? As culture minister and later head of state broadcasting, he hounded reformists and aired forced confessions. Yet hardliners have never fully trusted him. He criticised their vote-rigging to ensure Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s return as president in 2009. He has consistently favoured a nuclear agreement and, as speaker, hustled through approval of the 2015 nuclear deal. Rivals circle. Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf, the current speaker, may command deeper loyalties within the Guards and enjoys a close relationship to the supreme leader’s influential son, Mojtaba Khamenei. In two of his three runs at the presidency, hardliners have barred him.

Moreover, for all his establishment credentials, his connections are, to hardliners, suspiciously far-reaching. Instead of the starched white shirts favoured by most senior Iranian officials, he wears loose black ones that owe something to Johnny Cash. And he has many relatives in the West. One nephew is an academic in Britain; a daughter taught in America until Iranian critics in exile forced her out of her university job because of her father’s position. And what if Mr Larijani were ever to ascend to power, and was minded to normalise at home and abroad? It is far from clear that Iran’s fractious opposition—or its regime ideologues—would endorse his authority to do so. ■