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Mohammad-Reza Bahonar is not an opposition figure. He is a former deputy speaker of parliament and longtime insider of the ruling establishment. That is what makes his latest remarks so revealing.
In an interview conducted in early October, Bahonar said younger Iranians no longer want someone in the position of a “boss or intellectual leader” telling them how to think. More strikingly, he declared that the country does not need a “sheikh and savior.” Rouydad24, reflecting on his remarks this week, explicitly compared his changing tone with the earlier political trajectories of Ali-Akbar Nategh-Nouri and Ali Larijani—figures progressively pushed away from the ruling core.
In another political system, Bahonar’s language might pass as commentary on social change. Inside a regime whose constitutional architecture is built around velayat-e faqih—the proposition that a single clerical authority stands above elected institutions—it strikes much closer to the center. Only months after Mojtaba Khamenei inherited the supreme leadership, an old conservative is publicly acknowledging that the social premise underlying political guardianship itself is collapsing.
The significance becomes clearer when Bahonar is placed alongside Mohammad-Jafar Ghaempanah, executive vice-president and head of the presidential office. Earlier this year, Ghaempanah openly rejected the proposition that the Supreme Leader’s opinion should automatically become state policy. Discussing a Supreme National Security Council decision, he said that if everything the leader said simply had to be implemented, “parliament and the SNSC would have no meaning.” He went further: the leader expresses an opinion, that opinion is subjected to expert review, and the system may accept or reject it.
When Mojtaba Khamenei forbids the "#IranWar or negotiation” binary, both camps defy him within days. The new Leader’s word is no longer final. The pillar that once capped factional war is fracturing.
Analysis by @MehdiOghbaihttps://t.co/l4x1BQDA5V— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) September 1, 2026
Kayhan immediately recognized the challenge. The hard-line newspaper responded that the government, parliament and judiciary were obliged to obey and implement the leader’s view, not subject it to independent “expertise.” Its reaction exposed the real dispute: not merely policy, but whether Mojtaba Khamenei’s word is actually final. Kayhan’s attack was echoed by a series of Friday prayer leaders and state media outlets across the country. Yet Ghaempanah publicly refused to walk back his remarks.
That argument has not been settled. It is now resurfacing across virtually every major crisis confronting the regime.
On October 6, barely six weeks after Mojtaba Khamenei explicitly prohibited actions that undermine national unity, Tasnim confirmed that an impeachment request against Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi had been formally registered in parliament. Hard-line lawmakers have attacked the negotiating track with Washington even as Major General Yahya Rahim Safavi, a senior military adviser to the Supreme Leader, has explicitly stated that Mojtaba Khamenei approves the negotiations. That makes the contradiction considerably sharper: hard-liners are not merely challenging the government’s diplomatic initiative; they are attacking a negotiating track that, according to one of the Supreme Leader’s own senior advisers, has his approval.
"A leader who merely ratifies is a leader who can be replaced by another ratifier. #Peace would retire the emergency that crowned him; war keeps grinding the economy that could bury him," Farid Mahoutchi writes.https://t.co/30kNzyCW3O
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) August 8, 2026
The economy is producing the same centrifugal pressure. Even after Mojtaba Khamenei instructed officials not to highlight the country’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities, senior figures have continued to publicly describe precisely those weaknesses. On October 12, Masoud Pezeshkian warned that mishandling fuel-price reform could effectively “upend society,” an unusually blunt acknowledgment that an economic decision could trigger another explosion from below. Days earlier, parliament speaker Mohammad-Bagher Ghalibaf told the security forces that, after failing through external confrontation, the enemy was now seeking to create “insecurity inside the country.”
These are not the statements of a political class confident that one unquestioned center controls events. They are the language of competing factions looking for someone else to blame before the next crisis breaks.
These are not ordinary disagreements between competing political currents of the kind found in a democratic system. None of these factions challenges the clerical dictatorship itself. What is changing is their willingness—and increasingly their ability—to subordinate their interests to a single commanding authority. Under the pressure of economic crisis, external confrontation and fear of renewed unrest, each faction is scrambling to protect its own position, even when doing so means exposing the regime’s vulnerabilities or disregarding instructions from above.
Mojtaba Khamenei calls Iran the world’s “fourth superpower”—even No. 1 by “divine calculations.” Yet #IranProtests persist across the country, the rial is at record lows, inflation is called a security threat, critics are jailed, social restrictions tighten, factional battles…
— NCRI-FAC (@iran_policy) September 29, 2026
Even Bahonar has immediately become a target. Tasnim attacked him on October 12 in unusually personal language over another disputed statement, asking how much “news-making” at the expense of people’s reputations was acceptable.
However, there is a deeper problem confronting Mojtaba Khamenei.
The office of Supreme Leader was designed to function as the regime’s fasl al-khitab—the final word. Yet Ghaempanah has argued that the leader’s word can be reviewed and rejected. Bahonar now says society no longer wants a “sheikh and savior.” Parliamentarians seek to remove ministers engaged in diplomacy that a senior adviser says Khamenei himself has approved. Pezeshkian publicly warns of social upheaval even after Khamenei instructed officials not to advertise the country’s weaknesses, while Ghalibaf speaks openly of the danger of internal insecurity.
These contradictions are therefore symptoms of weakness, not political diversity. The regime’s intertwined economic, social and international crises are narrowing the room available for its factions to reconcile their competing interests, while Mojtaba Khamenei has been unable to impose the discipline his office demands. In a dictatorship built around the supremacy of one man, that is not normal factional competition. It is evidence of an eroding velayat-e faqih at the very moment the regime is confronting crises on multiple fronts.