In fact, the most striking feature of the immediate aftermath of his death has been continuity: Iranian missiles have continued to fly, senior officials have struck defiant postures, and security forces have moved swiftly to shape the streets before the streets can shape them. That early continuity is not incidental: it reflects Khamenei’s handiwork, namely a political system engineered to absorb shock and continue functioning.
The Islamic Republic was designed to concentrate ultimate authority in the office of the Supreme Leader but under Khamenei it learned long ago to distribute coercive power across overlapping insтιтutions—the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) and the internal security apparatus—to allow the state to not only repress dissent and project its power but also endure during moments of crises and uncertainty. Those architectural decisions have produced a system capable of continuing to fight even as it negotiates internally over who ultimately holds the right to command.
Indeed, the consтιтution of the Islamic Republic anticipates exactly this moment: it provides for a temporary transfer of the Supreme Leader’s duties to a leadership collective—the president, the head of the judiciary, and a senior cleric from the Guardian Council—while the ᴀssembly of Experts, a body of senior clerics consтιтutionally mandated to select the Supreme Leader, deliberates and makes its choice.
On Sunday, the Islamic Republic invoked that pathway and appointed President Masoud Pezeshkian, a reform-leaning politician, Chief Justice Gholam-Hossein Mohseni-Ejei, a veteran judicial and intelligence official close to the security establishment, and Ayatollah Alireza Arafi, a Guardian Council member and head of Iran’s seminaries in Qom, to the interim leadership council.
Consтιтutional procedure and political reality are rarely the same thing. The decisive question is not which body holds formal authority but where power consolidates in practice: among clerical insтιтutions that safeguard the system’s legitimacy, or among security actors that can enforce order while the conflict grinds on.
