Ali Khamenei
Ali Khamenei may eventually be faced with a situation of whether to sacrifice President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, whose "reelection" he announced, or go down himself with the ship.
Khamenei is a shrewder politician than Ahmadinejad. Whereas Ahmadinejad has a penchant for alienating even hard-liners, Khamenei reached out and for now seemingly coopted some of those that seemed to be previously be sitting on the fence, namely Speaker of the Parliament Ali Larijani and Mohsen Rezaei [2009 presidential candidate], both of whom are tremendous opportunists.
(…) By all accounts, anyone whom you talk to amongst the political elites in Tehran will tell you that Khamenei had become more powerful than he’s ever been in his twenty-year tenure as leader. The Islamic Republic’s most powerful institutions—the Guardian Council, parliament, the presidency, the Revolutionary Guards—are all currently led by individuals who are either directly appointed by Khamenei or unfailingly obsequious to him. Khamenei has in many ways become a modern-day shah, with a turban instead of a crown. But I believe he miscalculated. This election, or I should say this "selection," was an insult to people’s intelligence. Political, economic, and social malaise had been brewing for many years and this "selection" was for many people the last straw.
(...) The dilemma that Khamenei faces is that if [Mir-Hossein] Mousavi becomes president, he’s not going to be a subordinate president like Ahmadinejad is and like Khatami was. In the 1980s, Mousavi was prime minister when Khamenei was president, and he was widely thought to have been more influential and powerful than Khamenei was. It’s widely known, despite the fact that they are distant relatives, that they have a very contentious relationship. Given what transpired over the last two weeks, Khamenei has lost enormous political capital with the Iranian public. He’s lost enormous political capital with the Iranian political elite. He’s going to have to calculate whether he wants to save Ahmadinejad’s presidency at all costs in order to have a subordinate president who’s not going to challenge him, or whether he’s willing to compromise by accepting a Mousavi presidency and a potentially much more limited political role for himself.
(...) Khamenei’s modus operandi is to wield power without accountability. This is how he’s ruled the last twenty years. Because the president of Iran has such a high profile both domestically and internationally, when thing aren’t going well in Iran—and they usually aren’t going well in terms of economic malaise, political restrictions, and social restrictions—the president usually bears the brunt. If you do a Google search for Ahmadinejad, ten more million hits come up than a Google search for Khamenei. But in reality, he holds the vast majority of constitutional authority. If a decision is made to either annul the election or overturn the results, he’ll have the Guardian Council do it even though the Guardian Council is under his jurisdiction. That’ll be another way to try to deflect accountability and project himself as a magnanimous leader staying above the fray.
Mir Hossein Moussavi
The weight of the world now rests on the shoulders of Mir-Hossein Mousavi. I expect that Khamenei’s people have privately sent signals to him that they’re ready for a bloodbath ; they’re prepared to use overwhelming force to crush this ; and is he willing to lead the people in the streets to slaughter ? (…) The anger and the rage and sense of injustice people feel will not subside anytime soon, but if Mousavi concedes defeat he will demoralize millions of people. At the moment the demonstrations really have no other leadership. It’s become a symbiotic relationship : Mousavi feeds off people’s support, and the popular support allows Mousavi the political capital to remain defiant. So Mousavi truly has some agonizing decisions to make.
Ali Akbar Rafsandjani
[Ayatollah Ali Akbar] Rafsanjani’s role also remains critical. Can he coopt disaffected revolutionary elites to undermine Khamenei ? As Khamenei said, they’ve known each other for fifty-two years, when they were young apostles of Ayatollah Khomeini. I expect that Khamenei’s people have told Rafsanjani that if he continues to agitate against Khamenei behind the scenes, he and his family will be either imprisoned or killed, and that the people of Iran are unlikely to weep for the corrupt Rafsanjani family.
Previously sacred red lines in Iran are now being challenged. People are now beginning to openly question the institution of the velayat-e faqih, or the rule of the jurist, which is the Khomeinist system of governance that was implemented in 1979. It is unprecedented that people would begin to openly challenge Khamenei’s legitimacy as supreme leader, and indeed question the legitimacy of the institution of the supreme leader. There are widespread reports that [Akbar] Hashemi Rafsanjani, Khamenei’s kingmaker, is trying to assemble a coalition of grand ayatollahs in Qom against Khamenei. Rafsanjani is head of the Assembly of Experts, a body that has the constitutional authority to anoint and remove the supreme leader.
