Ali Khamenei’s 37-year reign ended abruptly on February 28, 2026, in a US-Israeli strike. His son Mojtaba now holds the office. Unlike his father, Mojtaba never held public office. He was known instead as the long-time manager of the Beyt, the Supreme Leader’s office, where he cultivated the security services and deep networks inside the Revolutionary Guards: the two pillars the regime’s survival rests on.

The system has far more institutional experience than it had during its first succession in 1989. But the landscape Mojtaba faces is far more dangerous, and the comparison explains why.

1989 versus 2026

When Ruhollah Khomeini died, he had already cleared the path for his successor. He had purged his designated heir, Ayatollah Hossein-Ali Montazeri. He had ended the war with Iraq by “drinking the poison” of a UN ceasefire. And in 1988 he had ordered the massacre of tens of thousands of political prisoners, most of them members of the MEK, crushing any organized challenge before it could form. Facing an immediate threat to the system, the factions, led by Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, united behind a little-qualified Ali Khamenei.

Mojtaba inherits nothing of the kind. The confrontation with Washington, stable when his father took power, is at its peak. The regime’s social base is a fraction of what it was in 1989, worn down by repeated nationwide uprisings and economic collapse. And the elite he must command is openly divided.

There is a paradox here. The war that killed Ali Khamenei is also what made his son’s succession possible. In peacetime, a dynastic handoff would likely have set off a factional war. The state of emergency let the establishment push it through.

“Even justified” disputes

Mojtaba’s first major message, marking the anniversary of the current parliament, revealed both his ambitions and his anxieties. He singled out Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf for praise, positioning him as a key lieutenant. He introduced a new ideological phrase, describing Iranians as a “commissioned nation” experiencing a new Be’sat, a term reserved in Islamic tradition for the Prophet’s divine commissioning. The language signals an ambition to stand above even his father’s ideological authority, while crediting the “awakening” to the nation rather than himself.

The core of the message was a warning. Factional and social differences, he said, must not turn into division, because the enemy, having failed militarily, now seeks Iran’s “social fission.” He urged officials not to let “unjustified, or even justified” disputes turn into conflict. That phrase moves the red line. Even legitimate grievances, about the economy, corruption or governance, now count as a threat if they disturb stability. It is the language of a leadership that knows society is past its breaking point.

Not a junta, but not a hegemon

Many Western analysts now describe Iran as a military dictatorship run by the IRGC and the Supreme National Security Council. The Guards do manage day-to-day survival. But the security apparatus cannot rule as a corporate junta. It needs the religious authority of the Supreme Leader to keep its predatory factions from tearing each other apart. The real question is whether Mojtaba has the personal authority to do that.

His call for unity was immediately turned into a weapon by rival camps. The faction around Ghalibaf, which controls the executive and the negotiating tracks, wants technocratic crisis management: stabilize the economy, end attacks on the government and the Security Council, and roll back the wartime decentralization that handed power to provincial IRGC commands. The ultra-hardline faction around Saeed Jalili rejects that pragmatism. It insists unity is only possible around “revolutionary principles,” opposes diplomatic concessions, and frames the real danger as “infiltration” rather than division. Jalili’s camp dominates state television and the nightly loyalist rallies the regime relies on to keep the streets. An effort by Ghalibaf’s allies to remove Jalili from the Security Council failed.

The Guards’ own media, Tasnim and Javan, have tried to straddle both sides: backing Mojtaba’s call against infighting, while echoing Jalili’s warnings about infiltration, espionage and Starlink.

The “son of Noah” episode

The sharpest sign of the fracture came from Hamid Rasaee, a cleric aligned with the hardline Paydari Front. Under the headline “Who is worthy of leadership?”, he posted on Telegram the Quranic verse in which God tells Noah that his son “is not of your family; his conduct is unrighteous.” The argument was that inheritance in an Islamic state is earned through righteousness, not blood.

The response was furious. Conservative outlets accused Rasaee of a thinly veiled attack on the succession; one rebuttal pointedly noted that the new leader was running the state “despite his own physical injuries.” Rasaee retreated, calling the hereditary reading a politicized lie, but repeated that he backs Mojtaba for his competence, not his lineage. Even in retreat, the point stood: some of the regime’s own hardliners do not accept the dynastic principle.

Since then: building a base

The months since have shown how Mojtaba is trying to impose his authority. On August 9, he appointed former IRGC chief Mohsen Rezaei as secretary of the Supreme National Security Council, replacing Mohammad Bagher Zolghadr, who was close to Ghalibaf. A day later, he formally named Ahmad Vahidi commander of the IRGC and put former Guards intelligence chief Hossein Taeb in charge of the Basij. There are also signs of an alliance between Vahidi and former IRGC commander Mohammad Ali Jafari.

The pattern is clear: rather than balance the factions as his father did, Mojtaba is leaning on old-guard security men whose loyalty is personal, while trimming the reach of the Ghalibaf camp he once praised.

What to expect

Two assumptions should be discarded. The first is that the killing of Ali Khamenei would make the state collapse on its own. It did not: decentralized provincial commands held the system together through the first shock. The second is that the regime is a monolith that will carry on unchanged under military management.

The reality is a regime deeply, perhaps irreversibly, weakened. The tentpole has broken, and the new Supreme Leader lacks the authority to restore the old balance. The factional struggles his father managed for decades are drifting toward open conflict. In a society this close to the edge, those internal contradictions will not stay inside the palace. They are more likely to spill back into the streets, on a larger scale than before.