The Iranian regime may have crushed the latest round of protests in its streets, but the Islamic Republic’s long-term leadership remains far from resolved.
Whether by overthrow or old age, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 86, will soon need a replacement, and this latest nationwide eruption has only drawn the question of his successor into sharper focus.
“It’s time to look for new leadership in Iran,” President Donald Trump told Politico in an interview Saturday.
Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian forcefully rejected any suggestion of Khamenei's removal Sunday, warning on X: “An attack on our country’s Supreme Leader is equivalent to a full-scale war with the Iranian people.”
But the unrest has highlighted the complex divisions within Iran's ruling clerical regime and security forces, as well as within its opposition.
The short answer is that Iran does not have any clear heir apparent, and that any transition away from the Islamic theocracy that has ruled for nearly 50 years is unlikely to be straightforward.
“If Iran goes down the revolution path, it’s going to be the sort of Syria-fication of the country, and that will be very bloody,” Ellie Geranmayeh, a senior policy fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told NBC News.
Leaderless unrest
Iran’s sanction-crushed economy is in perpetual crisis, and the regular protests and dwindling electoral turnout suggest “the regime is very unpopular and many Iranians want it replaced with a secular democracy,” said Barbara Slavin, a distinguished fellow at the Stimson Center, a Washington think tank.
However, “the problem is the lack of organized opposition,” she said.
Thousands of Iranians in cities across the country took to the streets in recent weeks. But what seems to be a relentless cycle of protests — 2009, 2019, 2022-23 and now 2025-26 — has failed to transform mass demonstrations into political results.
There are liberal reformers, such as human rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi, former Prime Minister Mir Hossein Mousavi or former deputy interior minister Mostafa Tajzadeh.
But all of these are either languishing in jails or under house arrest. The regime “has been very good at repressing dissent by jailing dissidents or forcing them into exile,” said Slavin.
The prince across the sea
Best known among the alternatives is Reza Pahlavi, the self-styled “crown prince” who has lived most of his life exiled in the United States.
He is the son of the country’s former king, or shah, whose decadeslong autocratic rule was bolstered by a CIA-backed coup before being toppled during the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
Pahlavi is offering himself as a transitional figure to steward Iran toward democracy.
“I think the Iranian people have already demonstrated in great numbers who it is that they want them to lead to this transition,” Pahlavi told a press conference on Friday.
It’s a pitch NBC News heard firsthand last year as part of a small group of media organizations invited by the crown prince to Paris. “I do not seek political power,” he told the audience, but merely to lead his country “down this road to peace and a democratic transition.”
He is popular among monarchists within the Iranian diaspora, many of whom were born after his father’s overthrow and do not remember SAVAK, the ruthless secret police that Pahlavi’s father used to imprison and torture his opponents.
It appears that there has been a concerted effort to raise Pahlavi’s profile online. Some protest videos analyzed by NBC News showed the audio was altered to add pro-Pahlavi slogans.
His image has indeed been held aloft by some protesters, though gauging his true level of support inside the country is difficult given the lack of reliable opinion polls and independent media.
“Pahlavi’s new prominence is a natural product of hatred of the regime by the Iranian people,” said Elliott Abrams, Trump’s special envoy to Iran during his first term and now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“When he appears on TV wearing a white shirt, tie and suit, he represents the modern life Iranians want,” he added. “That doesn’t mean people want a monarchy, even a constitutional monarchy, but he clearly has a support base and might have a role.”
One hurdle for Pahlavi, perhaps, is his lukewarm review by Trump.
“He seems very nice, but I don’t know how he’d play within his own country,” Trump told the news agency Reuters earlier this week. If Iranians did accept him, “that would be fine with me,” he said.
The exiled prince has received criticism for appearing to support Israeli strikes against his homeland, and this month described the regime crackdown against protesters as “a war” — something critics said risked legitimizing the killings.
Ultimately, many Iranians believe the country’s future must be driven by its residents, rather than Iranians abroad.
Out of the picture for 50 years, figures like Pahlavi are “not in a position to be game changers” if they don't link up with anti-regime actors and defectors inside Iran, said Alex Vatanka, a senior fellow at the Washington-based Middle East Institute think tank.
“There are a lot of things they can do, but they’re not in the streets fighting,” he said.
The insiders
If Khamenei rules until his death, he could hand power to his son Mojtaba Khamenei, 56, who rarely makes public appearances.
Mojtaba was among nine members of the supreme leader’s inner circle sanctioned by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2019, and is viewed as having played a role in past violent crackdowns.
However, it is unclear the extent to which he has the support of senior clerics, many of whom are members of the Assembly of Experts, the body designated to choose the next supreme leader.
The country’s most powerful military, political and economic force is the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, though it lost its top leaders in the 12-day war with Israel last summer.
If the Guard Corps can come out of the current turmoil intact, analysts say it could close ranks to preserve its vast business interests while allowing a new supreme leader to hold a largely ceremonial role.
“The IRGC is now more than anything else a corporation,” Abbas Milani, the director of the Iranian studies program at Stanford University, said in a telephone interview. “They want to keep what they have and preserve it.”
But there are other regime figures who may have aspirations.
Ebrahim Raisi, the president killed in a 2024 helicopter crash, was widely viewed as a protégé of and potential successor to the supreme leader.
Ali Shamkhani, an adviser to the supreme leader, hard-line parliamentary speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf and Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, are often touted as names in the frame.
They “would face a lot of internal opposition, but they would also have a lot of allies within the system,” said Patrick Clawson, a senior fellow at the Washington Institute think tank.
Their roles in a brutal regime might not be an issue for Trump, who has been happy to hold summits with pariahs such as North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
“There is every reason to think he would work with a new leader who could blame everything on the previous crew,” said Clawson.
