Throughout Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s tenure as Supreme Leader, his central preoccupations have been amassing more power, ensuring the continuity of Iran’s revolutionary regime, and gaining the upper hand for his hardline conservative ideology in the factional disputes over the Islamic Republic’s trajectory. Khamenei himself has proven a nimble autocrat adept at navigating the vicissitudes of Iran’s dynamic political terrain.

Khamenei understood that true longevity in the position would require more than trying to cloak himself in his predecessor’s aura. Khamenei would eventually need to be seen as a legitimate religious authority and source of emulation in his own right, capable of issuing decrees that would carry weight with the Shi’a faithful. When he assumed the Supreme Leadership, Khamenei was politically precarious. However, the powers afforded him by dint of his position helped him quickly establish patronage links that gave him a base and networks of support.

Khamenei recognized the need to tread cautiously when he first assumed power, and he assured the political and clerical elites who loyally served Khomeini that they would retain their positions and status.

Despite his public show of reticence, Khamenei and political leaders such as Rafsanjani, who backed his ascension, immediately undertook to buttress Khamenei’s public image and sell him to the skeptical population and senior clerical elites once elected. Although his religious scholarship was lacking, Khamenei possessed excellent skills as a micromanager and an individual who understood the levers of power in the complex Iranian political system.

Ayatollah Khomeini died on June 3, 1989, leaving a leadership void at the top of the Islamic Republic. The amendments to the constitution, which diluted the qualifications for the supreme leadership, had not yet been ratified, but the situation's urgency required decisive action. The Assembly of Experts convened on June 4 to designate Khomeini’s successor.

From the moment he returned to Tehran on February 1, 1979, Khomeini’s frail appearance prompted speculation about his health, placing the question of succession into focus from the outset of the Islamic Revolution. In the spring of 1980, he suffered a minor heart attack, further heightening the urgency of tackling the issue of succession.

Ayatollah Khomeini died on June 3, 1989. Khomeini’s health had been an issue since he assumed the Supreme Leadership and became more concerned after he suffered a heart attack in 1986. Throughout his final years, finding a suitable successor who could carry on his radicalism legacy and ensure the revolutionary regime's continued survival was one of his primary preoccupations. Khomeini’s unique charisma and religious stature enabled him to amass nearly absolute power and to prevent the bitter ideological factionalism among the clergy from derailing the ship of state.

As the Khomeinists maneuvered to increasingly encroach upon all facets of state administration and consolidate power, Ali Khamenei’s fervent loyalty to Khomeini and close relationship with Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who was Khomeini’s closest acolyte, began paying dividends.

Khomeinist Consolidation of Power

The unity, discipline, and spirit of cooperation that Iran’s competing factions exhibited in toppling the monarchy broke down almost immediately after Shapour Bakhtiar’s short-lived government fell. The hopes and aspirations of the Iranian population for more inclusive, less repressive governance, democracy, and economic justice never came to fruition.

Sayyed Ali Khamenei had a deeply religious upbringing and modest economic background before ascending to the highest levels of religious and political power in the Islamic Republic of Iran. He was born on July 16, 1939, in the northeastern Iranian holy city of Mashhad, which is the country’s second most populous city and home to the Imam Reza Shrine, a renowned site visited by millions of religious pilgrims each year. Khamenei was the second son among eight children born to a clerical father of Azeri descent.